Greetings!

I am happy to let you know that we have just launched Media Viewer 0.2 on our first pilot site, MediaWiki.org, where it is now enabled by default for all users (previously, it was only available as a Beta Feature).

Media Viewer aims to improve the multimedia viewing experience on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, to display images in larger size and with less clutter — as well as invite more people to use our images.

We invite you to try out this new tool today, which you can do on this test page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo

Please let us know what you think on this discussion page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer

You can learn more about this new tool here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer

After this first pilot, we plan to enable Media Viewer by default for these next pilot sites: • April 17 - Confirmed: Catalan, Hungarian, Korean, English Wikivoyage • April 24 - Proposed: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Slovak, Vietnamese

Based on these first pilot results, we plan wider releases on larger wikis in the following weeks, with a goal to deploy to all wikis next month. Our release schedule will be based on new findings at each stage of deployment. If this product performs well and meets user needs, we may accelerate the deployment pace -- or we may slow it down for some sites, as needed.

More details are available in this release plan: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan

To discuss this release and review the final product together, we invite you to join our next IRC chat, on Wed. Apr. 9 at 18:00 UTC. We also invite you to try out the tool on your own wikis, where it is available for early testing as a Beta Feature in your user preferences, as described above.

Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this release. And many thanks to all the community members who helped create this feature with us in recent months!

We look forward to bringing a richer multimedia experience to your community very soon.

Regards as ever,

Fabrice on behalf of the Multimedia Team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)