Dear devs, This is a list of things that I consider are tech/dev priorities for Wikimedia Commons. Thanks for your attention. (0. SUL) 1. Improved search. Dumping Mayflower in there would be a great start: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/ I suggest replacing the current search box with a Mayflower search box, and moving the current text search box below the toolbox. 2. Backup. No image dumps, still? This is quite worrying. To say the least. 3. Multilingual tagging system (ie categories). I would prefer a system where a category has a 'preferred' or 'display' name able to be defined in each language, but also alternate forms that can be used to access the category. So a category' might have an alternate name in English might be [[category:Sydney, Australia]]. Using this to tag an image will work. Also typing it in a search box. But at the bottom of the image they will see a link to the category using the display name [[category:Sydney]]. Users will see the display name of the category according to their language settings. If nothing else this is the most important part. We are extremely hampered by not being able to use multilingual names for categories. It's a blow for a site that wants to be multilingual and serve all languages equally, to have no choice but to say 'sorry, you have to do this part in English'. 3. Structured data. This is basically needed to feed into the search engine. I don't know how Mayflower does it but I suppose it's not ideal. At the moment we use a [[template:information]] but it's not hugely well suited to it. Fields include Description, Source, Permission, Date, License, Geocode, Other_versions, etc etc etc. 4. Move/rename images function AKA image redirect capability As Tim says, "How hard can it be?" :) This is only an issue because it is such a common request. 5. Rating system I would like a simple youtube-style 5star rating thing for image pages, for logged-in users. More importantly it should be possible to sort search results (and maybe categories?) according to rating. This is important because, if you think about Wikipedia, any search query likely has only half a dozen highly relevant results at most. Most I would wager only have one. But on Commons, querying over individual images, a reasonable search query can and often does have dozens or even hundreds of results. The best way to sift through them would be by ratings. There is only so much manual rating we can do (and we are doing it). As Commons grows this is only going to get worse. This may not seem like a priority simply because we don't have the functionality now, but I have a strong feeling this is the right direction. 6. Improved category handling If the search was improved enough, it might make categories (and galleries) more or less irrelevant. I can only pray. However for the moment categories are often used for navigation. The bug of not putting all subcats on the first page is a frequent problem. The problem of not seeing the total number of items in the category is a problem. The lack of ability to sort a category by, e.g. date item was added to it, or date item was uploaded, is a problem. The lack of ability to 'auto-flatten' a category is a problem. 7. Multilingual support. There is one pretty big problem with how screwed up the interface is for RTL languages. It's very weird for those users. The lack of ability for anonymous users to choose a language and have it 'stick' is also limiting. As I mentioned, lack of ability to display category names in native languages is a problem. Lack of automatically translating templates is a problem (we would like them to work as MediaWiki messages do, more or less). We seriously would like to be a multilingual wiki. But unfortunately I can't really say we are at the moment. ------------------------------------------------------------------ OK those things are all my big-ticket items. These are some lower priority ones. 8. Playback support. Been discussed a little. Still needs major improving. 9. RSS and InstantCommons, 'embedding' feature These items are about making our content accessible and keeping the tie to our site. Keeping the 'tie' gives us some more control, which is necessary since I suspect the lifespan of an image is pretty unpredictable. Maybe when image renames work it won't be so bad. It would be nice for admins to be able to define RSS feeds, also to have RSS feeds of items added to a category. InstantCommons: Wikitravel, Wikia, Wikihow, etc etc etc etc etc would love to be able to easily access our content. We can benefit from their participation. I'm not sure where this is at now. 'Embedding' feature - I'm just thinking about the success of the Flickr API. 10. Global native MW Checkusage, CommonsTicker functionality. Checkusage is an utterly vital tool for us. Since the toolserver seems vastly improved of late this has dropped on my list. But I don't think we should have such critical tools on the toolserver only. When toolserver dies it's as if RC stopped existing for vandalfighters: really, what can you do... CommonsTicker could be an extension that each local wiki could alter to their preferences, in terms of where and when they want notification about images they are using. At the moment it's a bot that can leave messages on the talk pages of articles where an image is used, that is in danger of being deleted on Commons. 11. ImportFreeImages extension (importing images from Flickr). This was high priority six months ago when I opened the bug request (8854). Since nothing happened, we developed community and bot processes to solve the problem of verifying Flickr licenses -- the same problem this extension would solve. ------------------------------------------------------ Lowest priority -- things which we currently do with Javascript or external tools, that would be nice to have as native functions. 12. Ability to move images from another Wikimedia wiki to Commons 13. User upload gallery function 14. Bulk upload function 15. Auto-resize galleries according to window size. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:ResizeGalleries.js 16. Category and gallery 'previews' Example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:SWB9470_Puetzstrasse.jpg?withJS=Med… http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gallerypreview.js This has improved usability so much even for me, an experienced user. It just makes you so much more likely to explore. And that is fantastic for how people should ideally use our site. 17. "Fotonotes". http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:ImageBoxes.js (a start, but I think not totally user friendly yet) Ability to put user annotations directly on an image. Another one of those things that once we start using I'm sure we won't be able to do without. 18. Special:Upload flexibility Well, we are satisfied with our uselang hack so far, but if it kills the cache and our toy gets taken away, that won't be so cool. So that's your call I suppose (well, so is everything :)). BTW I have a feeling these last ones are relatively easy to do, especially since we have existing tools. So they might be nice projects for beginning wannabe devs, or experienced devs who would like a quick break from something more painful, etc. :) Also some bugs are listed here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs (some are parts of above mentioned issues, some are not) regards Brianna user:pfctdayelise PS> I believe Wikisource also has some welldefined problems they believe are priorities for them. Last I know is this one: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2007-June/000294.html BirgitteSB should be a good contact for a more up to date list. -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/