Reading/Multimedia

A new multimedia team is being formed at the Wikimedia Foundation, to build features that will enable easier contributions of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

Read more about our first two projects:
 * Beta Features
 * Media Viewer

Both features are now available for early testing by logged-in users on MediaWiki.org, on Meta.Wikimedia.org and on Wikimedia Commons. Based on test results, we aim to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Goals
Here are the multimedia team's feature goals for the coming year:


 * Improve the viewing experience for multimedia content
 * Enable multimedia contributions in a more seamless way
 * Improve file curation and feedback tools to manage contribution streams
 * Help editors add media files to articles on Wikipedia and other projects
 * Support organizers of multimedia campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments
 * Better integrate Wikipedia and Commons

Other goals:
 * Implement a first version of Beta Features, to make it easier to test new features
 * Improve the upload pipeline to fix key bugs and support more features
 * Implement structured data on Commons and integrate it with Wikidata
 * Support more file formats, especially new audio/video codecs

Near-term goals
The multimedia team is now focusing on these near-term projects for the first two quarters of fiscal year 2013-14 (Oct. 2013 to Mar. 2014):
 * Beta Features
 * Media Viewer
 * Upload Wizard
 * File Notifications
 * File Feedback
 * New A/V Formats
 * Key Metrics

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.

For more information, visit our planning page for 2013-14.

Activities


In coming months, we plan to focus on these core activities:
 * Improve the display and viewing of 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.

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

Open tasks include:


 * Product tasks
 * New Gallery Layout - development in Q1
 * Media Viewer - design and development in Q1
 * File Notifications - specifications in Q1 - development in Q2
 * File Feedback - design in Q2 - development in Q3
 * GLAM Toolset - development in Q2
 * Upload Wizard Refactor - development in Q2


 * Other tasks
 * Bug Triage
 * Architecture Audit
 * Metrics Research
 * Multimedia Roundtables
 * User Experience Design
 * Video codec licensing

To learn more about projects now in development or under consideration, visit our Mingle project site and/or product backlog.

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


 * Product Manager: Fabrice Florin
 * Engineering Director: Rob Lanphier
 * UX Director: Jared Zimmerman
 * Front-end Developer: Mark Holmquist
 * Software Engineer: Gergő Tisza
 * Senior Platform Engineer: Bryan Davis

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!

Community
The Wikimedia Foundation invites community members from Wikipedia, Commons and other MediaWiki projects to discuss our plans through a variety of discussions about multimedia issues and new feature ideas. We hope you can join us for one of these events.

To keep up with our work and participate in our conversations, please join our public Multimedia mailing list, where we discuss software tools that support the viewing, contribution, curation, discovery and use of multimedia content on Wikipedia, Commons and other MediaWiki projects. You can learn more and subscribe to this list on this page.
 * Join our mailing list

We will host another IRC chat in late October. Come back to this page then for a date.
 * Upcoming events

Here is a report on our recent discussions about multimedia with community members: (Here's the log of that discussion, for the record. During this one-hour chat, we talked about our Multimedia Plans in the coming year, as well as this proposed Media Viewer, which we are starting to develop -- and the new image gallery tags, which we just released.)
 * Past events
 * IRC Chat on Multimedia - #wikimedia-office - August 22

(Here are links to videos of that Roundtable: (Part I and Part II; subsets from both videos will be uploaded to Commons in coming days -- and we're looking for volunteers to transcribe them, if anyone's interested.)
 * Roundtable on Multimedia - Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong - August 8, 2013


 * IRC Chat on Multimedia - #wikimedia-office - July 18, 2013


 * Roundtable on Multimedia - Google Hangouts - July 10, 2013

Both discussions were generally found productive by all participants, and many community insights are now being included in the foundation's development plans. Thanks to everyone who participated in these invaluable conversations!

Communications

 * Breaking through walls of text: How we will create a richer Wikimedia experience - Blog post, April 2013

Related documents

 * See also:
 * Multimedia Project Slides - WMF July 18, 2013 (see update)
 * Multimedia Goals for 2013-14

Media storage

 * Scaling media storage at Wikimedia with Swift by Ben Hartshorne, February 9, 2012.

The current Wikimedia storage architecture (as of February 2013) relies on a central NFS server for storage of media files. It's a single point-of-failure in our infrastructure, and scaling this out to multiple machines is difficult with the current MediaWiki design.

The goal of this project is to build a file store using Swift, and deploy Extension:SwiftMedia which is a new MediaWiki extension that interfaces with Swift file stores.

Roadmap

 * Deploy SwiftMedia for purposes of storing thumbnails: scheduled for the week of February 6th
 * FileBackend refactoring, and modifying SwiftMedia extension to use FileBackend
 * Implement multi-file writing code to write to both NFS store and Swift store
 * Deploy multi-file, primarily serving off of NFS store, while populating Swift store.
 * Switch over to Swift store as primary store
 * Decommission NFS store

Documents

 * Multimedia/Issues
 * Swift page on wikitech – the full details of the Swift deployment.
 * Multimedia/Architecture - currently a list of grievances. Might one day describe our multimedia architecture.

TimedMediaHandler

 * Enabled in November 2012.


 * TimedMediaHandler: An extension to display audio and video files on wiki with timed text support, real time stream switching and server-side transcoding support.
 * Extension:TimedMediaHandler/TestPlan and
 * Multimedia/ReviewNotes