UploadWizard/status

Last update on: 2011-11-30

2010-09-01
As part of the ongoing Multimedia Usability project, we recently conducted a usability study to assess and compare the current upload system and our prototype. We're currently ironing out remaining back-end and interface details. The Wikimedia community is warmly invited to test the prototype, read the Questions & Answers page and provide additional feedback.

2010-10-01
Primary developer Neil Kandalgaonkar checked the bulk of the available code into a branch, and it's undergoing code review now. Guillaume Paumier is working on the Licensing tutorial and the Multimedia Usability project report. We're working hard to meet the October 31 deadline for the Ford Foundation grant.

2010-11-01
This project has been extended one more month (until the end of November) to have a more robust implementation and time for testing before launching this on Wikimedia Commons. Neil Kandalgaonkar has finished development of a temporary storage system for media files missing required metadata like copyright or source information. Roan Kattouw has started prep-work for deployment of this feature scheduled for late November. The feature is currently in testing on the Commons prototype.

2010-12-01
This feature has been in development for the past year, funded by the Ford Foundation. We have deployed this on Nov 30th on Wikimedia Commons.

2011-01-01
After the deployment of this feature in beta on November 30th, we've spent the past month working on analyzing feedback from users, fixing bugs and polishing the feature. Additional localized versions of the Licensing tutorial were also created.

2011-02-01
The final Multimedia usability project report was published on meta, and the licensing tutorial was localized into more languages, including Hindi and Farsi. Bugfixes are in progress.

2011-03-01
Ryan Kaldari has joined Neil Kandalgaonkar to fix bugs and prioritize the work to be done for an UploadWizard 1.0 release.

2011-04-01
Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ryan Kaldari continued to fix bugs, test functionality, and generally ready the software for a 1.0 release. The changes were deployed to the Commons prototype and Neil sent out a call for testing to uncover remaining bugs. Roan Kattouw reviewed the code and deployed the 1.0 release to Commons on March 30th.

2011-05-01
<section begin=2011-05-01 />Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ryan Kaldari continued to fix bugs, and added new features as well. The upload wizard now offers a configurable & localizable license picker; it is also possible to abort uploads, and recover from errors. A built-in feedback form allows users to report bugs and issues directly. Roan Kattouw reviewed and deployed the new code every week in April. Last, Brandon Harris provided design recommendations to improve the interface.<section end=2011-05-01 />

2011-06-01
<section begin=2011-06-01 />The Upload wizard was enabled as the default upload system on Wikimedia Commons on May 9. It was disabled shortly after that because of issues believed to come from a bug in ResourceLoader. It was re-enabled on May 17 after further investigation. The next phase is being planned, which includes changing how images are stored prior to completion of the wizard.<section end=2011-06-01 />

2011-07-01
<section begin=2011-07-01 />Neil Kandalgaonkar continued to fix bugs, and added an additional functionality to show thumbnails before upload in modern browsers.<section end=2011-07-01 />

2011-08-01
<section begin=2011-08-01 />Ian Baker joined the team and started to work on the UploadStash back-end. Jeroen De Dauw started to extend the UploadWizard code base to support customized campaigns, like the Wiki Loves Monuments contest. Neil Kandalgaonkar refactored some libraries to better support Ian and Jeroen's work, and committed some fixes to reduce categorization and licensing mistakes.<section end=2011-08-01 />

2011-08-31
<section begin=2011-08-31 />Ian Baker worked on the TitleBlacklist API, as well as bug fixes for UploadStash. Together with Neil Kandalgaonkar, he investigated video thumbnail issues. Ian also released Neil's message string library (that leverages wikitext, jQuery, and internationalization tools) after packaging it into a MediaWiki extension. Contractor Jan Gerber added XHR FormData support to UploadWizard, and chunk uploads. Jeroen De Dauw's code to support customized campaigns was deployed to the Commons prototype wiki, then to production on Commons; Jeroen also added new features based on the feedback from Wiki Loves Monuments organizers. Neil reviewed Jeroen's and Jan's code, and generally prepared the code for deployment.<section end=2011-08-31 />

2011-09-30
<section begin=2011-09-30 />Ian Baker, Neil Kandalgaonkar and Jeroen De Dauw fixed a number of bugs, notably related to the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign and the deployment of protocol-relative URLs to Wikimedia Commons. Ian also researched solutions for multi-file selection and AJAX uploading. Jeroen and Neil worked on a feature to support custom licenses.<section end=2011-09-30 />

2011-10-31
<section begin=2011-10-31 />Ian Baker implemented multi-file selection. Neil Kandalgaonkar did research on how licenses are used on Commons, added custom wikitext licenses with various safeguards to ensure this wouldn't result in more poorly licensed files, and implemented wording changes on the advice of Wikimedia general counsel. Ben Hartshorne implemented a simple way to add geocoding templates. Jeroen De Dauw also worked on this feature.<section end=2011-10-31 />

2011-11-30
<section begin=2011-11-30 />Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ian Baker deployed a set of important improvements, including multi-file selection for browsers which support it, custom wikitext licenses, an improved licensing workflow, basic support for location data extraction, and more. Support for chunked uploading (which improves reliability of large file transfers) was temporarily backed out and is still being worked on.<section end=2011-11-30 />