Reading/Multimedia/2013-14 Goals



This is our planning page for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Multimedia team for the 2013-14 fiscal year. Please note that many of the objectives below are tentative, and provided here for discussion purposes only, as we start the planning process with our team.

Goals
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
 * Improve curation and feedback tools to manage contribution streams
 * Help editors add media files on Wikipedia articles
 * Support organizers of media campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments

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.

At the present time, the number of Commons contributors is one of the few editor engagement metrics that are increasing. Over the past year, Commons has seen sustained growth in contributors, and we expect that trend to continue. The web is also moving towards more visually driven interfaces, so having strong multimedia support helps WMF meet the expectations of modern readers.

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 contribution 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.

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


 * Product Manager: Fabrice Florin
 * Front-end Developer: Mark Holmquist
 * Back-end Developer: Jan Gerber (contractor)
 * Software Developer: Brian Wolff (contractor)
 * User Experience Designer: Jared Zimmerman (part-time)

We are also recruiting for two more positions for the multimedia team: a multimedia systems engineer and a senior software engineer. Please spread the word about this unique opportunity to create a richer multimedia experience for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites!

Activities

 * Improve display/playback of various types of multimedia content
 * Support photo upload features developed by the mobile team with backend improvements and curation tools.
 * Improve integration between Wikimedia Commons and client projects like Wikipedia or third party users
 * Support for competitions/contests

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.