Allow smoother and easier Wikimedia Commons pictures discovery

Wikimedia Commons is 20 million media repository, all under a free license or in public domain.For over the year it has proved itself to be one of the most successful project for CC licensed images present.I have been a user of this project for over two years …. and over the years i felt the void in user experience and the which is primarily due to design and the availability of image shown…...which is also mentoined in Bug: 57805

So as a step I started thinking upon ways to improve Users experience and help them to view their favourite content in a better way.

My idea to the solution is to build a interface for wikicommons users with help of newly added current multimedia feature called “lightbox” implemented through multimediaviewer extension…….but as per the feature of wikicommons i wish to modify the extension to have an layout as shown in Proposal Image 1:



rather than the usual multimediaviewer images shown in Proposal Image 2:



Now its key feature:

1). Represents the media that the the user desires to view can be of any possible formats that Multimedia Viewer supports.

2).Represents the file name of the current media which is shown when the mouse howers over the image.

3).Various options for the user to use the file when clicked upon the information block it takes up to Page where the file is present (i.e,commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:xxxxxxxxxx.jpg) this menu also appears when the user hovers the mouse over the image.

4).This search box will offer the search feature by including ajax feature and will search from the sub categories of searched category in which the user is currently present.

5).List of different subcategories of the current category.

6).Diff thumbnails of the media present under the given subcategory ; the one which is currently selected will be shown with diff border.

7).The subcategory being currently displayed will displayed at the current tab

There are various feature which comes up whenever we hover the mouse over the media…...when the mouse will not hover the media the view will be as shown in Proposal Image 3:



There is also a second thought to make a lightbox from scratch without a use of MultimediaViewer but owing to the continuous integration of support of media extensions to be added in the MultimediaViewer i think the use of MultimediaViewer would be crucial factor for the project.

PS:Please give your valuable advice as your valuable advice could be useful for the improvement of ideas

-Aalekh Nigam

"aalekhN"