Reading/Multimedia/Research

Here are preliminary research goals for the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team, which is being formed to build features that will enable easier contributions of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

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

The multimedia team will also address a significant amount of 'technical debt', with these specific goals:
 * Implement a first version of beta features, to make it easier to test new features
 * Implement structured data on Commons and integrate it with Wikidata
 * Improve the upload pipeline to fix outstanding bugs
 * 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. 20140:
 * Beta Features
 * Media Viewer
 * Upload Wizard
 * File Notifications
 * File Feedback
 * New A/V Formats
 * Key Metrics

Key metrics
To measure our progress with the multimedia program, we propose to track these two primary metrics on a monthly basis:
 * files uploaded
 * files used in pages

While we have been tracking the number of uploads for several years now, this metric only provides a partial measure of success, as a large number of uploaded files are never used in articles. Hence the need for a second metric to track how many files are actually published in articles on our sites, serving our ultimate goal to provide a richer multimedia experience for our users.

Besides these two metrics, we plan to collect other data to inform our next steps for the plan above. For example, we have already started to collect these file metrics, as well as these user metrics.

Going forward, here are some of our key research questions related to file feedback, curation, discovery and publication.

Product Research
For our first products, we would like to track basic usage patterns, so that research can inform our next steps. Here are some examples of what metrics we hope to collect.

Beta Features
Here is a preliminary list of research questions we hope to answer about the Beta Features tool, for discussion purposes.

Beta Features Adoption
Here are our goals for researching Beta Features adoption. (See also this Trello ticket, as well as Mingle ticket #55).


 * How many users are opting into beta features?
 * What's the breakdown of adoption by user tenure?
 * What are the most popular features by number of enrolled users?
 * How many users are selecting the auto-enroll option for future features?
 * What proportion of users is disabling beta after trying it out?

These metrics would be collected with EventLogging and related technologies, and visualized with LIMN dashboards (see example). We would track this data on a daily basis, as well as on a cumulative basis.

Microsurveys for Beta opt-out
Here are our goals for researching why people opt-out from Beta Features (see also this Trello ticket):

Capture reasons why people decide to opt out of specific beta features. A microsurvey approach could be helpful (the same that we used to collect gender data for account registrations [2]) to make this work.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour/Microsurveys [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey

Media Viewer
Here is a preliminary list of research questions we hope to answer about the Media Viewer feature, for discussion purposes. (See Mingle tickets #53 and #54).

First Release Usage
We plan to collect descriptive usage data for the first release, to answer these research questions:
 * Thumbnail Clicks: How many times did users click on a thumbnail to open the media viewer?
 * Full-screen Clicks: How many times did users click on the full screen button? (total and percentage)
 * Site Name Clicks: How many times did users click on the Commons or other repository link? (total and percentage)
 * Close Clicks: How many times did users click on the close button? (total and percentage)

Future Releases Usage
We plan to collect descriptive usage data for future releases, to answer these research questions:
 * Audio-Visual Clicks: How many times did users click on a playback or other A/V tool?
 * Feedback Clicks: How many times did users click on a feedback tool?

These metrics would be collected with EventLogging and related technologies, and visualized with LIMN dashboards (see example). We would track this data on a daily basis, as well as on a cumulative basis.

Future Research
In coming months, we will want to collect other data to inform development of our upcoming File feedback, curation, discovery and publishing tools, as described in this early draft.

In coming days, these questions will be prioritized and turned into a long-term metrics plan for multimedia, based on available resources.