Reading/Multimedia/2013-14 Goals



This is our planning page for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Multimedia team for the 2013-14 fiscal year. Please note that many of the objectives below are tentative, and provided here for discussion purposes only, as we start the planning process with our team.

Goals
Our overall goal is to enable easier viewing, contribution, curation, discovery and publishing of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects, to encourage more user participation.

Specifically, we plan to address the following areas in 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 discover and add media files to articles on Wikipedia and other projects
 * Support organizers of multimedia campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments

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.

Multimedia serves different purposes for each of our main user groups:
 * Readers expect multimedia content to enrich their experience, so they can get informed more effectively
 * Contributors can use smartphones and digital cameras to increase the scope of what can be captured and added to our sites.
 * Editors can augment text articles with rich media to better inform readers and support their diverse learning styles.

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, which requires us to support it through more modern tools and a dedicated team.

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 multimedia participation 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. We also want to provide better support to help editors discover and publish media files within articles throughout our sites.

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


 * Product Manager: Fabrice Florin
 * Front-end Developer: Mark Holmquist
 * Back-end Developer: Jan Gerber (contractor)
 * Software Developer: Brian Wolff (contractor)
 * User Experience Designer: Jared Zimmerman (part-time)

We are also recruiting for two more positions for the multimedia team: a multimedia systems engineer and a senior software engineer. Please spread the word about this unique opportunity to create a richer multimedia experience for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites!

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.

Milestones
This is a tentative outline of possible milestones in fiscal year 2013-2014, for discussion purposes. The proposed milestones below are likely to be adjusted in coming weeks, based on community and team feedback.

Interdependencies
To meet our goals for multimedia, we plan to partner with a number of internal and external teams:

Wikimedia Teams
 * collaborate with WMF's design team for media viewer and other tools
 * work with E2 team for notifications and discussions
 * work with mobile team for campaigns, file curation/feedback
 * collaboration with Visual Editor for media finder and publishing

External Teams
 * Wikidata integration for tags, geotags
 * adapt Wikia code for lightbox, galleries, slideshows?
 * work with Kaltura for audio visual player