UploadWizard

UploadWizard is a multi-file, step-by-step JavaScript wizard to upload multimedia files to a MediaWiki website. It is available as a MediaWiki extension.

The Multimedia team is now planning to incrementally upgrade this tool in 2014 and 2015, by fixing some longstanding bugs, as well as improve parts of the user experience and refactoring some of the code.

Rationale
The Upload Wizard aims to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia projects.

This tool is now widely used to upload images on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository associated with Wikipedia; any media file shared on that site can be used in any Wikipedia page in any language. Wikimedia Commons is curated by a multilingual community and recently reached 21 million files.

More details about the origins of this project can be found in the Upload Wizard archive page; the main feedback page is located at commons:Commons:Upload Wizard feedback.

Goals
Here are some of our goals for Upload Wizard:
 * engage more users to contribute media
 * provide a smoother experience for all
 * add more media content on our sites
 * fix critical bugs, to make things work better

In coming months, we propose to:
 * Plan & discuss improvements
 * Solve bugs & technical debt
 * Improve the user experience
 * Incremental code refactoring
 * Develop new modal tool for other uses

Timeline
This is a first draft of our proposed roadmap for fiscal year 2014-15, for discussion purposes.


 * Q1 (July-Sep. 2014)
 * Platform: fix bugs, unit tests, chunked uploads, metadata structure
 * Features: progress bar, drag and drop, better FAQ, replace infographic
 * Metrics: funnel analysis, drop-off rate, UI clicks, # of uploads, uploaders, other upload tools


 * Q2 (Oct-Dec. 2014)
 * Platform: fix more bugs, separate interface code, metadata-related infrastructure
 * Features: better licensing & category tools, add metadata anytime during load


 * Q3 (Jan-Mar. 2015)
 * Platform: provide modal tool to other teams, cross-wiki uploads (enwiki > commons)
 * Features: upload a file from a page, better tools for multiple files
 * Notifications: 'your file was used'


 * Q4 (Apr.-June 2015)
 * Follow up work and bug fixes

Users
Our primary users for Upload Wizard include:
 * new contributors
 * experienced contributors

We will aim to support both user groups evenly, with an initial focus on Commons users -- then contributors on Wikipedia and other sites. Note that you must be registered and logged-in to use Upload Wizard.

We also aim to serve these secondary users:
 * editors
 * campaign organizers
 * developers

Metrics




First metrics
Here are upload metrics for Upload Wizard from February 2014: (1)
 * 18k uploaders / month
 * 292k uploads / month

It's worth noting that Upload Wizard represents:
 * 80% of all uploaders (14k per month, a lot more during Wiki Loves Monuments)
 * 56% of all uploads (141k per month, the rest are handled by bots and other uploads tools)

For more info, click on the metrics graph thumbnails to the right.

(1) Data from Wikimedia Commons in Feb. 2014. Source: Wikimedia Foundation

More metrics
Here are key metrics we're considering to track the upload process:
 * number of uploaders
 * number of uploads
 * upload drop-off rate
 * number of uploaded files used
 * number of uploaded files viewed

We are starting development to collect more metrics data, and are tracking this work in these tickets:
 * Funnel Metrics for Upload Wizard (#541) (in development for this sprint)
 * Upload Wizard funnel metrics - basics (#609) (done, but only 4 data points for now)
 * Upload Wizard Metrics - Data collection 1: Major steps (#305) (to be developed in coming weeks)
 * Upload Wizard Metrics - Data Collection 2: Detailed Steps (#603) (to be developed in coming weeks)
 * Upload Wizard Metrics - Dashboards (#587) (to be developed in coming weeks)

Feedback
We are now reviewing hundreds of feedback posts and help questions about Upload Wizard last year, which are being analyzed in this spreadsheet.

Here are some of the key issues reported so far:
 * upload hangs
 * upload takes too long
 * issues with multiple files
 * confused by license forms
 * unclear prompts and error messages
 * problems with categories (e.g. can't search them)
 * issues with large files that don't load well
 * would like a progress bar during upload
 * want to add info while image loads
 * would like simple explanations
 * want other info templates

In coming weeks, we will update this first list with more details on some of the more commons issues reported by our users.

Usability
We have done a number of usability studies for Upload Wizard in recent months, and plan to do more in coming months.

Here are videos of some recent testing sessions:
 * T1
 * T2
 * T3
 * T4

We will summarize our observations from current and future studies in coming months. For now, here are some preliminary observations and analysis of the current design by our designer Pau Giner.

Discussions
In coming weeks, we will invite community members to give us more feedback on this project through a variety of discussions, which will take place onwiki, on IRC and via Google Hangouts. We hope you can join us for one of these events.

To participate in these conversations, we invite you to check this page again in early June and/or join our public Multimedia mailing list, where we will announce discussion dates shortly.

Current Workflow
Here are the main steps of the current workflow for Upload Wizard:
 * Start - click on the Upload link
 * Learn - reading the help infographic, click 'Continue'
 * Upload - select media files to upload, add more files if needed
 * Rights - fill in author, source and license information
 * Describe - fill in title, description, date or other info
 * Use - copy code to add images to articles or share them with others

To see how Upload Wizard currently works, visit this page or view these screenshots.

New Designs
Based on current feedback and usability tests, our designer Pau Giner has prepared some preliminary design ideas to help define our vision for Upload Wizard (see slides below).

In coming weeks, we will discuss these design ideas with our community, to improve them based on user feedback. Note that implementing this vision could take a couple years of development, so we don't expect to build them all right away; for now, these mockups can help us reach a shared understanding on which improvements are most important or practical.

Mockups
Here are the first designs we are discussing with community and team members:

These mockups will be adjusted based on community feedback.

These designs can be viewed together in these vision slides. Individual screenshots will be added to this page soon.

Scenarios
These first designs are based on these user scenarios:
 * Upload images to a page
 * Upload a single image on a topic
 * Upload multiple files on different topics

Issues
They attempt to address these key issues:
 * Adding a picture to a page is disconnected
 * Providing metadata is a big upfront effort
 * Categorization is painful
 * Multiple file upload
 * Lack of aids for input
 * Meaningless untranslatable titles
 * Initial infographic is too verbose
 * Help needed to understand licenses
 * Upload button on Commons homepage is hard to find

To learn more, check out these design notes by our designer Pau Giner.

Planning Tasks
In a first planning phase, we would like to focus on these tasks in coming weeks:
 * Collect metrics, funnel analysis
 * Review usability studies
 * Review feedback and help questions
 * Host community discussions (onwiki, IRC, roundtables)
 * Discuss modal solution with WMF teams (VE, Flow, Mobile)
 * Run limited user survey with community and team members
 * Triage current bugs, in collaboration with community
 * Review current code and patches (e.g.: Rob Moen)
 * Identify 'quick wins' and 'must-haves'
 * Estimate development time for key tasks
 * Determine top priorities in 3 categories:
 * bug fixes
 * UI improvements
 * code re-factoring

These planning tasks will require a couple sprints, before we can seriously determine our next steps based on solid data. The biggest challenge for this project will be prioritizing the most important tasks we can take on this year: we could easily spend a year improving Upload Wizard full-time, but can only spend a portion of our time on it, because we also need to work on other important tasks this year, such as Structured Data.

Development Tasks
Here are some possible epic stories we could take on this year:


 * Features
 * Show progress bar during upload - Q1?
 * Support drag and drop for importing files - Q1?
 * Clearer help, prompts, infographic - Q1?
 * Recover from warnings and errors - Q1?
 * More prominent upload link on Commons - Q1/2?
 * Add metadata anytime during upload - Q1/2?
 * Simpler licensing forms and decision tree - Q2?
 * Easier category tools (e.g.: search, recent) - Q2?
 * Find my recent uploads easily - Q2/3?
 * Upload a file on an article page - Q3?
 * Better tools for multiple files (copy selected) - Q3?


 * Technology
 * Fix critical bugs that prevent uploads - ongoing
 * Re-factor chunked uploads code - Q1/2?
 * Collect and analyze upload metrics - Q1/2?
 * Add unit tests and instrumentation - Q1/2?
 * Define metadata structure with Wikidata - Q1/2?
 * Separate interface code from other functions - Q1/2?
 * Provide modal tool to others (VE, Flow, Mobile) - Q2/3?
 * Enable cross-wiki uploads (from Enwiki to Commons) - Q2/3?
 * Support different license templates (TemplateData) - Q3/4?
 * Upload unsupported video formats (via Internet Archive) - Q3/4?

We will track our development work for this project on this Upload Wizard board on our Mingle planning site. Other development boards include our Current Sprint wall and Current Cycle wall.

Bugs
We keep track of Upload Wizard bugs in the bug tracker.

Over the years, many bugs have accumulated for this project, because Wikimedia Foundation did not have a dedicated team to address them. Now that the multimedia team has taken ownership of Upload Wizard, we will work diligently to fix the most important bugs first, then gradually resolve the rest of the relevant issues over time. Thanks for your patience and understanding :)

If you find any technical bugs, please report them.

Code

 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T270
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265
 * http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/uploadwizard-refactor-planning

Other Tools
Besides Upload Wizard, other upload tools are available to users, which are tracked at commons:Commons:Upload tools.