Reading/Multimedia/2014-15 Goals



This is our planning page for the Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team for the 2014-15 fiscal year. This working draft will be updated from time to time, based on community and team feedback.

Please note that some of the goals below are still tentative, and provided here for discussion purposes only. This first proposal is based on this first annual planning meeting, held by our team May 29, 2014 in San Francisco. For more background information, see also our previous year's planning page.

Feel free to add comments, questions and suggestions on this discussion page.

Rationale


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

In coming years, we aim to build or improve software tools to:
 * Improve the viewing experience for multimedia content
 * Enable multimedia contributions in a more seamless way
 * Provide file feedback and curation tools to manage contribution streams
 * Help editors discover and add media files to articles on Wikipedia and other projects
 * Support organizers of multimedia campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments
 * Upgrade our software infrastructure and repay our 'technical debt' from prior years

Goals
Our specific goals for this year include:
 * engage more users to contribute media
 * add more media content on our sites
 * provide a smoother experience for all
 * fix critical bugs to make things work better

Users
This year, we propose to focus on these primary user groups:
 * contributors -- the people who upload media on our sites
 * editors -- the people who add media on articles

Notes:
 * We aim to support both casual and experienced users within each group.
 * We will initially focus on Commons users, then serve users on Wikipedia and other sites.
 * Secondary user groups include admins, campaign organizers and developers.

Activities
This year, we propose to invest our time on these main activities:
 * Structured Data - improve the way we store metadata -- critical, because most other features depend on it.
 * Critical Bugs - fix urgent bugs in our infrastructure -- and become more familiar with our entire code base.
 * Features - develop or improve user-facing projects, including:
 * Upload Wizard -- our main user-facing project this year (includes Commons Upgrade and Modal Tool for other sites)
 * Other Features -- Media Viewer 0.3, File Notifications, File Page, Kaltura Player, Feedback, Campaign Tools

Projects
Specifically, we propose to focus on these main projects:

A. Must have:
 * Upload Wizard - incrementally improve the code and the user experience over time - Q1, Q2, Q3
 * Structured Data - work with Wikidata and the community to plan, develop code, and migrate data on Commons - Q2, Q3, Q4
 * Critical Bugs - fix serious issues that need immediate solutions (e.g. image scalers, timed media handler) - heavy in Q1 & Q2, lighter afterwards
 * Multimedia Metrics - track usage data more effectively, to inform our decisions (e.g. number of uploaders, uploads, files used, drop-off rates, etc.)

B. Should have:
 * Media Viewer 0.3 - develop missing features, fix bugs (zoom, urgent community requests) - Q3
 * File Notifications - implement 'your file was used', make many people happy - Q3
 * File page - update Commons description pages - design in Q2, develop in Q4

C. Could have:
 * Insert Media - work with other teams (VE, Search) to make it easier to discover and add files to pages - Q4?
 * Audio/Video Upgrade - Kaltura 2.0 Player update, better error messages - Q4?
 * Media Viewer 0.4 - support Audio, Video, PDF and other file formats - as time allows
 * File Feedback - provide positive feedback tool (e.g. 'thanks', 'favorite') - as time allows
 * Campaign Tools - better integration with WLM and other campaigns - as time allows

Note that these priorities are preliminary and subject to change.

Roadmap
Here are some key milestones we are aiming for fiscal year 2014-2015. These milestones below may be adjusted from time to time, and updated on a quarterly basis, based on prior quarter's results, as well as community and team discussions.

Note that these milestones and roadmap are preliminary and subject to change. They will be re-evaluated quarterly, based on previous quarter results, as well as community and team feedback.

Interdependencies
To meet our goals for multimedia, we plan to partner with these other teams:


 * Wikidata: implement structured data on Commons and other sites
 * Visual Editor: upload media to articles, find and use existing media
 * Search: make it easier to find media based on structured data
 * Mobile: view and upload media on mobile platforms
 * Kaltura: upgrade audio and video players
 * Design: improve the user experience / usability
 * Core Features: upload media to discussions (Flow)
 * Analytics: improve our metrics

Metrics
Here are key metrics we're considering to track the impact of our work:
 * number of uploaders
 * number of uploads
 * upload drop-off rate
 * number of files used
 * number of files viewed