Greetings!
I’m happy to announce that we just enabled Media Viewer by default on nine more pilot sites: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Slovak, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
1. Overview We’re releasing Media Viewer gradually, a few wikis at a time, to test it carefully before deploying to the next batch of sites. So far, the tool has been well received on our first pilot sites: Catalan, Hungarian and Korean Wikipedias, as well as on English Wikivoyage, as outlined below. Next Thursday, we plan to deploy to some of our first large wikis: Dutch, French, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish Wikipedias. Learn more about this release plan here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
2. Metrics We’re now logging about 336,000 image views per day on a global basis, as shown on this graph: http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv
About half of these views are coming from the Hungarian Wikipedia, and the rest from Wikimedia Commons, English Wikipedia and other pilots. More metrics dashboards are available for selected sites on this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Metrics
3. Performance We are now tracking image load performance globally, and fist results suggest that images take over a second to load on average (50th percentile), but can take up to 5 seconds when looking at worst case for most users (90th percentile), as shown in this graph: http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_performance_image_global
We’re also encouraged by early comparisons of the time it takes to open an image with Media Viewer versus on a Commons File, the current default: the mean load times for these two methods seem to be very close, on the order of 2-3 seconds on a cold cache, as shown in this preliminary graph: http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv#media_viewer_vs_file_pa...
4. Surveys We are now running surveys in multiple languages, to validate whether or not this feature is useful to readers and editors alike. Overall response so far is generally favorable. Here are the current results: * English Survey: 64% find the tool useful, 12% don’t find it useful, 24% are not sure (50) * Hungarian Survey: 47% find the tool useful, 47% don’t find it useful, 5% are not sure (268) * Catalan Survey: 62% find the tool useful, 15% don’t find it useful, 23% are not sure (13)
We’re also starting new surveys in French, German and Portuguese. You can find links to live results and comments from all these surveys here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey#Results
5. Usability For the past few months, we have been running a series of usability studies, with positive results. Testers are typically able to complete most common tasks successfully, and they have helped us find new ways to improve the user experience for areas they found confusing. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Usability_testing
6. Your feedback How can we improve Media Viewer? Are there any critical issues that should be addressed for this first release? Please let us know what you think of this tool — and join other users from around the world on this discussion page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
We’d also be grateful if you could take this quick survey, to let us know how Media Viewer works for you. It only takes a minute and means a lot to us: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/media-viewer-1?c=email
Many thanks to all the team and community members who made this launch possible!
Enjoy,
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
P.S.: New improvements take about 2 weeks to get deployed to all wikis. If you would like to test the latest version of Media Viewer, follow the test tips on this demo page on MediaWiki.org: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation