UploadWizard

WMF engineering activity

UploadWizard

A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.

Group:	Features
Start:	2009-10-15
End:
Management:	Alolita Sharma
Team:	Ian Baker, Erik Möller

UploadWizard is a multi-file, step-by-step JavaScript wizard to upload multimedia files to a MediaWiki website. It was designed by Guillaume Paumier as part of the Multimedia usability project and developed by Neil Kandalgaonkar. It is available as a MediaWiki extension.

Although the grant-funded Multimedia usability project ended in December 2010, work on the wizard was continued; Neil Kandalgaonkar added new features and fixed bugs, aided by Ryan Kaldari and now Ian Baker.

Rationale

From the WMF Blog: "Prototype upload wizard unveiled for Wikimedia Commons":

If you’ve ever tried to upload a file to Wikimedia Commons, you may have grown frustrated. Our new upload wizard aims to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia projects, and the first test results look promising.

Wikimedia Commons is the media library associated with Wikipedia; it is a central repository for all Wikimedia projects, and any media file shared there can be used in any Wikipedia page in any language. Wikimedia Commons is curated by a multilingual community and recently reached 7 million files.

Wikimedia Commons relies on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Because MediaWiki was primarily developed for text-based content like Wikipedia articles, contributing multimedia works has always been a challenge.

In July 2009, the Ford Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve the tools and workflows related to multimedia participation. The following Multimedia usability project started in October with a phase of preliminary research, and we worked with the Wikimedia community to identify the key issues and design solutions.

More details can be found in the grant proposal.

Design documents

Most of the initial documentation pertaining to the Upload wizard was hosted on the Usability wiki.

• User requirements & specifications
• Original user interface design document; Additional design recommendations
• Software design document; Front-end software design document
• Message parser document
• Geolocation feature design document and use cases

Legacy documents

• Software design documents: Features; tech notes

Operations

• Assessment of the upload wizard on Wikimedia operations
• Bandwidth comparison with the legacy upload tool on Wikimedia Commons

Testing

• Test plan & prototype wiki
  • List of things to do to make prototype server ready for formal testing
• Commons:Prototype upload wizard feedback

Usability testing

June 2010

• 

  

  Summary video: Legacy interface

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  Summary video: Upload wizard prototype

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  Summary video: Room for improvement

May-June 2011

Testing sessions done through usertesting.com:

• May 5, 2011 — 3 testers
• May 9, 2011 — 3 testers
• May 17, 2011 — 3 testers
• May 17, 2011 — 3 testers: legacy Wikimedia Commons upload form, to compare tester success/performance with UploadWizard.
• June 7, 2011 — 4 testers
• June 25, 2011 — 3 testers: Tester 'hrhme' demonstrates blacklist issues very well
• June 26, 2011 — 3 testers: Tester 'zazazing' fails on 'two files with the same title' bug

Additional documents

• Multimedia usability project report on meta-wiki.
• All files uploaded with UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons
• commons:Special:UploadWizard: upload wizard on Wikimedia Commons
• Media files about the Multimedia usability project on Wikimedia Commons
• Task management: The development of this extension is primarily being tracked by bugzilla:27260. See also the full bug list
• Status updates