Extension:FileAnnotations/Design

This extension lets you add annotations to files. It currently only supports images but can later be used to add annotations to audio and video files too. It is an improvement on the ImageAnnotator gadget and currently has a similar feature set.

Goal
"Text and photos and videos are great, but today we don't have the same kind of pervasive hyperlinking in media that makes disappearing down a Wikipedia clicking journey both fun and educational. - From T133526"To achieve this FileAnnotations might benefit by being more structured than ImageAnnotator. Commons has guidelines on what kind of annotations are considered good and what format makes sense given a particular context. Encouraging these guidelines through the user interface, and making it easier to do the right thing, while still keeping the contribution process simple is important.

Users and use cases
Personas are we targeting and what their use cases might be.

Active reader

 * Discover the feature and figure out how to use it.
 * Use the annotations for a visual learning experience for her students.
 * Get encouraged to add annotations of her own as the contribution doesn't require much time or effort.

New editor

 * Be able to contribute without learning about too many policies.
 * Share his know about modern design without the hassle of creating new articles.
 * Get guidance on what annotations work best.
 * See his annotations on an article, without having to edit the article. This might be motivate him to get deeper into editing.

Active editor

 * Quickly tag event photos with relevant bands as links.
 * Monitor and revert any vandalism on annotations.
 * Improve annotations by others, by turning text annotations to links, for example.

What is a good annotation?
The guidelines on Commons on what makes a good annotation are helpful for users, but we need to find guidelines on what is helpful for the entire system. I feel that in some cases a link to Wikidata item would serve better than a Wikipedia article or a commons category. The way we display the link to the Wikidata item can make us reach closer to our goal too (I am thinking something like Popups and not just a plain link).

Current state
(the image links take you to the mediawiki.org file page, go to commons to see the annotations)

Annotation types?

 * Wikidata link
 * Commons file link
 * Inter-wiki link
 * External link
 * Text

Discovery
Flash annotations on page load or scroll by

Encourage Annotating
Notify user that annotations can be added on this file if it has certain categories, for eg. people, maps

Annotating
Allow for structured annotating, tabs for each type of annotation. Encourage certain types more? Don't allow certain users to add certain kind of annotations (external links, text)

Editing
Seeing diffs

Ways to quickly improve others annotations by adding links or wikidata items?