Reading/Multimedia

The Multimedia team in the Reading department at the Wikimedia Foundation builds features that enable easier contributions and viewing of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

Here are our main user-facing projects at this time:
 * Structured Data
 * Upload Wizard
 * Cross-wiki upload

We invite you to join the community discussion on Structured Data for Commons — How can we bring machine-readable data to Commons with Wikidata? Please share your feedback on this talk page.

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.

Goals
See the "Multimedia" sections of the sub-pages of Wikimedia Engineering/2016-17 Goals.

Current projects
The Multimedia team is now focusing on these near-term projects:
 * Upload Wizard and cross-wiki uploading
 * Better tools for image reviewers to respond new uploads
 * ImageTweaks for non-destructive image editing (prototyping)
 * Structured Data (in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland; currently working on the FileAnnotations system and Content Streams)
 * Critical bugs in multimedia-related infrastructure (e.g. image scalers, video transcoding, etc.)

Inactive and semi-active projects
Projects that are not actively developed at the moment:
 * Server-side Javascript error logging
 * 3D file support
 * Media Viewer (development of 0.2 finished; see retrospective and research report; now the responsibility of the Reading department)

Phab Process

 * The Multimedia team follows a Kanban-like approach, continuously starting and resolving work in small increments and focusing on alleviating bottlenecks.
 * The Structured Data Backlog board is the team's primary backlog. Theoretically, it represents all work for which the team is responsible ("one source of truth"), in a "to-do" state, with categories for the work ("Triaged", "Next up", etc). It is triaged, curated, and managed by the team's Product Manager, who also queues up work for the dev team.
 * There is a Phabricator Herald rule that facilitates capturing tasks that were not manually added to the backlog. The team should update this rule whenever they create a new Phabricator tag.
 * The team also uses tags for individual products/projects, such as SDC-Depicts. There may additionally be Milestones (special combination column/projects) focusing on specific releases or batches of work.
 * The Current Work board, a Milestone of the backlog, is where all in-progress development happens. The dev team is responsible for managing this board, and radiating out information about the state of assigned tasks. As tasks are resolved here, they are also resolved anywhere else on Phab (e.g. the backlog), thanks to Phab's task-mirroring feature.
 * The Structured Data Design board is the home of the Structured Data team's tasks in design prep. It is also not part of the Herald rule, as it is an exception because of the unique nature of the tasks. The team trusts that the tasks will be surfaced to them when ready.