Reading/Multimedia

The Multimedia team in the Editing department at the Wikimedia Foundation builds features that enable easier contributions and viewing of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

Here are our main user-facing projects at this time:
 * Structured Data
 * Upload Wizard
 * Cross-wiki upload

We invite you to join the community discussion on [commons:Commons:Structured_data Structured Data for Commons] — How can we bring machine-readable data to Commons with Wikidata? Please share your feedback [commons:Commons_talk:Structured_data on this talk page].

Rationale
Multimedia enables users to learn about the world in vastly different ways than text articles. We believe that images, sounds and videos are key to engaging more users and supporting their diverse learning styles, as modern culture shifts towards more audio-visual than textual information delivery.

To better serve our users 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.

Goals
See the "Multimedia" sections of the sub-pages of Wikimedia Engineering/2016-17 Goals.

Current projects
The Multimedia team is now focusing on these near-term projects:
 * Upload Wizard and cross-wiki uploading
 * Better tools for image reviewers to respond new uploads
 * Non-destructive image editing (prototyping)
 * Structured Data (in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland; currently working on the FileAnnotations system and Content Streams)
 * Critical bugs in multimedia-related infrastructure (e.g. image scalers, video transcoding, etc.)

Inactive and semi-active projects
Projects that are not actively developed at the moment:
 * Server-side Javascript error logging
 * 3D file support
 * Media Viewer (development of 0.2 finished; see retrospective and research report; now the responsibility of the Reading department)

Team
Our multimedia team includes:


 * Engineering Director: Lindsey Anne Frankenfield
 * Team Lead: Mark Holmquist
 * Product Manager (acting): James Forrester
 * Software Engineer: Bartosz Dziewoński
 * Software Engineer: Matthias Mullie
 * Designer: Prateek Saxena