Reading/Multimedia/2013-14 Goals

This is our planning page for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Multimedia team for the 2013-14 fiscal year. It is still a working draft and comments are appreciated, with the understanding that it is not a final plan.

Please note that many of the objectives below are still tentative, and provided here for discussion purposes only, as we are still in the process of forming our new multimedia team, which may not be complete until the fall of 2013.

We expect to keep improving this plan in coming weeks, based on community and team feedback.

Feel free to add comments, questions and suggestions on this discussion page.

Goals
Our overall goal is to create a richer multimedia experience and invite more user participation on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

We aim to build software tools that enable easier viewing, contribution, curation, discovery and publishing of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

Specifically, we plan to address the following areas in the coming year:


 * Improve the viewing experience for multimedia content
 * Enable multimedia contributions in a more seamless way
 * Provide file feedback and curation tools to manage contribution streams
 * Help editors discover and add media files to articles on Wikipedia and other projects
 * Support organizers of multimedia campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments
 * Upgrade our software architecture and repay our 'technical debt' from prior years

We propose to make some progress on all those fronts during the year, but plan to focus more on the viewing and contribution workflows in the first half of the year, shifting to curation, discovery and publishing in the second half of the year.

Rationale
Multimedia enables users to learn about the world in vastly different ways than text articles. As modern culture shifts towards more audio-visual delivery of information, images, sounds and videos are key to engaging more users and supporting their diverse learning styles. In this changing information landscape, we can greatly improve the educational value of our sites by empowering everyone to share media, collaborate on improving that media, and using that media well throughout Wikipedia, Commons and MediaWiki sites.

Multimedia serves different purposes for each of our main user groups:
 * Readers expect multimedia content to enrich their experience, so they can get informed more effectively.
 * Contributors can use smartphones and digital cameras to capture more information and add it to our sites.
 * Editors can augment text articles with rich media to better inform readers and support their diverse learning styles.

Notes: At the present time, the number of Commons contributors is one of the few editor engagement metrics that are increasing on MediaWiki sites. Over the past year, Commons has seen sustained growth in contributors, and we expect that trend to continue, which requires us to support it through more modern tools and a dedicated team.

In previous years, we developed the technology infrastructure that previously was not available to support the storage and use of large amounts of multimedia. This was a necessary precondition for increased investment in multimedia participation tools in this fiscal year.

When developing new contribution streams (mobile photo uploads, improved integration of uploading into Wikimedia projects, etc.), we have to keep in mind that we are likely to receive a significant amount of low-quality or inappropriate uploads. Accordingly, we want to focus not simply on increasing the inflow of new contributions, but also on improving quality management tools, including simple means for audience feedback. We also want to provide better support to help editors discover and publish media files within articles throughout our sites.

Issues
Here are some key issues in current multimedia workflows, based on our ongoing community discussions and research. For each issue below, we recommend possible solutions proposed in our annual plan.

Viewing media files on Wikipedia can be a frustrating experience for casual users. Thumbnails link to confusing file pages instead of showing a larger image -- and we don't support standard audio or video formats. Users: most of our 500 million monthly visitors Proposed solutions: Media Viewer, New Audio/Video Codecs
 * Viewing

Uploading files is a complex workflow, and our Upload Wizard tool still has many unresolved issues. We need to refactor both the front-end and back-end code, as well as fix a lot of bugs. We also need to better support 'chunked uploads' of big files, as well as batch uploads of large media collections. The upload wizard tool makes it hard for casual users to categorize their new files, many of which get lost in the shuffle. Users: about 21k monthly contributors Proposed solutions: Upload Wizard, GLAM Toolset, Category finder
 * Upload

File curation on Commons is apparently done by a small group of a few hundred users, whose methods sometimes seem inconsistent with each other. Some delete a lot of files in batches, while others have more tolerant attitudes, leading them to keep content that some might consider inappropriate (e.g. 'soft porn'). Overall, content curation practices seem less developed on Commons than on Wikipedia -- and some view this free file repository in a more permissive way, particularly since curating the current backlog of 17 million files would be a formidable undertaking. This seems to be causing confusion and tension that are likely to require more deliberations with the community and the foundation. In the meantime, we may be able to provide a simple feedback tool to help surface relevant content, while the harder curation questions are being discussed. Users: under 1k curators on Commons Proposed solutions: Simple feedback tool, Discuss curation options with community
 * Curation

Only about 40% of the files on Commons appear to be used in pages on other MediaWiki projects. While some of this may be due to low-quality content, another likely cause is the lack of discoverability of relevant content and the difficulty of adding files to articles. To expand on the release of the Visual Editor's new 'Insert Media' tool, we can provide better ways to tag, find and place relevant files in articles for this critical end goal of our multimedia workflows. Users: about 80k editors on Wikipedia and other sites Proposed solutions: Better meta-data, Intersecting tags, geo-tags, Expand VE's 'Insert Media' tool
 * Publication

Our multimedia software architecture needs a major overhaul, as many of our current tools were developed in recent years without the benefit of a dedicated team. As a result, we will need to devote a good portion of our engineering resources to repay this 'technical debt' this year, to improve overall performance and scaleability, as well as fix the many bugs that have not been addressed yet. This means that our velocity for new feature development will be reduced accordingly in the near-term. We have started an architecture audit to determine the scope of this effort in coming months and years.
 * Software architecture

Activities


In coming months, we plan to focus on these core activities:
 * Improve the viewing experience for various types of multimedia content
 * Support content uploads with code refactoring and a better user experience
 * Develop feedback / curation tools to surface the best media files
 * Improve integration between Commons and Wikipedia, as well as other client projects or third party users
 * Support for media campaigns, competitions or contests like Wiki Loves Monuments.
 * Upgrade our software architecture and repay our 'technical debt' from prior years

To learn more about projects under consideration, check out this feature ideas page, as well as these updated project slides.

Milestones
This is a tentative outline of possible milestones in fiscal year 2013-2014, for discussion purposes. The proposed milestones below are likely to be adjusted in coming weeks, based on community and team feedback.

Interdependencies
To meet our goals for multimedia, we plan to partner with a number of internal and external teams:

Wikimedia Teams
 * collaborate with WMF's design team for media viewer and other tools
 * work with E2 team for notifications and discussions
 * work with mobile team for campaigns, file curation/feedback
 * collaboration with Visual Editor for media finder and publishing

External Teams
 * work with Wikidata for metadata, tags, geotags
 * adapt Wikia code for lightbox, galleries, slideshows?
 * work with Kaltura for audio visual player

Team
This year, we are expanding our multimedia team, which now includes:


 * Product Manager: Fabrice Florin
 * Engineering Director: Rob Lanphier
 * Front-end Developer: Mark Holmquist
 * Back-end Developer: Jan Gerber (contractor)
 * Software Developer: Brian Wolff (contractor)
 * User Experience Director: Jared Zimmerman

We are also recruiting for two more positions for the multimedia team:
 * a multimedia systems engineer
 * a senior software engineer.

Please spread the word about this unique opportunity to create a richer multimedia experience for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites!