[Commons-l] Announcement: UploadWizard is coming as default uploader

[Erik Moeller]

Hi,

We’re planning to make a change on May 9, 2011 [1]: We’ll replace the
link in the Wikimedia Commons sidebar that currently points to
Commons:Upload with a link to Special:UploadWizard (in all languages).
If all goes well, we'll also invite Wikimedia wikis to begin changing
their Commons upload links to Special:UploadWizard.

If you haven't tried the UploadWizard yet, go to

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard

to test it.

We’ve a made it easier to get back to the old form from
Special:UploadWizard, and added an invitation to help with
localization.

NOTE: We still need lots of additional translations, so if you can
help with that, please do so on translatewiki.net.

Sign up for translatewiki:
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:FirstSteps

Translation group:
http://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-uploadwizard

Current status:
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Multichill/stats

The quality, status and up-to-dateness of translations of the old
upload form is very mixed. By switching all languages immediately to
UploadWizard and working with translatewiki.net, we're hoping to
accelerate the process of getting solid localizations across the
board. We apologize for the short term inconvenience this may cause.
[2]

The old upload process will remain indefinitely available. There’s no
reason to remove it. This is purely a change to the default process
we’re exposing to the world. We feel we’ve fixed all the obvious bugs
that we know about (there are some annoying bugs that we do know about
left, but they’re not showstoppers). The best way for us to find the
remaining bugs is to have people actually use it as their first upload
experience and to continue to receive and process feedback.

As a reminder, here’s what UploadWizard gets us:
- Up to 10 files can be uploaded in one batch. We are hoping to expand
this feature set to allow for parallel uploading, multi-file
selection, and more.
- Some metadata is automatically extracted and pre-filled.
- You can see thumbnails before you’re completing your upload.
- Error cases should be handled in a clear and understandable interface.
- Less clutter due to systematic learning design as opposed to mixing
instructions and process.
- Much, much friendlier to new users as validated by our usability studies.

Major remaining gotchas:

- If your entire upload takes longer than 25 minutes, it fails. Very
annoying, we know. Not entirely trivial to fix but we know how and
we’ll get to it soon.

- Thumbnails for some file formats (video and audio, for instance) are
not shown during the upload process. This should not affect the
success of the actual upload.

- Right-to-left support is far from perfect and consistent.
Suggestions for improvement are most welcome. If you speak an RTL
language, please hammer the wizard and tell us is if it's a
showstopper issue for you -- we don't think that's the case, but we
need your input.

- There are a number of other known cases where uploads will stall and
the user has no option to fix the problem. It happens much less often
than it does with the old upload form, and we believe the most
important bugs (e.g. title blacklist related failures) will be
squashed as part of this release. There is a link to provide feedback
right in the subtitle of the page – if you do have a problem, please
report as much detail as possible!

How do we know the new process is much improved? Through qualitative
studies of the upload interface. See the report on the multimedia
usability project for details and videos:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_usability_project_report

We’re also continually user-testing the software through quick and
cheap user-tests using usertesting.com -- we’ll share our first batch
of test videos soon.

Please continue to add your thoughts & comments to the feedback page,
and we’ll aim to respond in a speedy fashion.

I'm very excited about this change and I hope you are, too. :-) We've
received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback regarding the
UploadWizard experience, and while there are still lots of ways in
which we can do better, we hope you'll agree that it's a huge step
forward.

All best,
Erik

== Notes ==

[1]  We may choose to push the date forward a bit if we run into
deployment issues.

[2] There's a subheader in the UploadWizard which takes you back to
the old upload form. To ensure that at least the link to the old form
is translated into your language (if you're an administrator or can
find one), you can edit the following user interface message in your
language (add "/language code" to the URL, e.g. "/pl" for Polish):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Mwe-upwiz-subhead-alt-upload

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate