Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons vs. local media search

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 1:28 AM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote: find they I'm breaking out this question since it's a concrete technical proposal; it should probably also be raised on the multimedia list. But we should answer it from the perspective "What's best for the user", rather than have it be driven solely by the NSFW corner case (which may also appear when searching images used on a project like en.wp alone). As a user, I might want to find images to add to an article. Having results from the central repository presented locally makes it easier to do so without visiting a separate site. (Consider this from the perspective of smaller projects especially, where the local search would be pretty much useless.) This is why VisualEditor presents Commons search results, as well. As a user, I might be interested in multimedia about a certain topic I just read about in Wikipedia. Showing only the results already in the Wikipedia article(s) about the topic would make it harder to find such media. Simple example: Let's say I read an article about a city, and I want to find other historic maps of that city. In many cases, these maps do exist on Commons but not locally. Should we therefore force people to visit Commons to find them? I would argue that from the ordinary user's perspective, the distinction between Wikipedia/Commons is less important than what they have in common, i.e. being large repositories of useful educational content (and hyperbole aside, 99% of Commons is pretty boring stuff). We could default to displaying locally used media and offer to search Commons with an extra click. From a usability perspective, you want to minimize the steps a user has to take, so good UX design would likely disclose results from Commons either a) always, clearly labeled or b) when no local results are available. There's no question that search UX, both on Commons and on Wikipedia, can be improved. I'm just skeptical that an unbiased evaluation of the user experience using standard UX heuristics would lead to a design that hides explicit content from initial search results. Distinguish different types of content more clearly and make it easier to find the stuff you want - sure, that's doable.