Reading/Multimedia

A new multimedia team is being formed at the Wikimedia Foundation, to build features that will enable easier contributions of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects.

Goals
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 curation and feedback tools to manage contribution streams
 * Help editors add media files on Wikipedia articles
 * Support organizers of media 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.

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. The web is also moving towards more visually driven interfaces, so having strong multimedia support helps WMF meet the expectations of modern readers.

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 contribution 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.

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

 * Improve display/playback of various types of multimedia content
 * Support photo upload features developed by the mobile team with backend improvements and curation tools.
 * Improve integration between Wikimedia Commons and client projects like Wikipedia or third party users
 * Support for competitions/contests

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.

Open tasks

 * Product tasks
 * New Gallery Layout - development in Q1
 * Media Viewer - design and development in Q1
 * File Notifications - specifications in Q1 - development in Q2
 * File Feedback - design in Q1 - development in Q2-Q3
 * Issue triage. Right now, the developers working on this are mainly in bugfixing mode, so flagging the highest priority issues would be appreciated.

Communications

 * Breaking through walls of text: How we will create a richer Wikimedia experience - Blog post, April 2013

Media storage

 * Scaling media storage at Wikimedia with Swift by Ben Hartshorne, February 9, 2012.

The current Wikimedia storage architecture (as of February 2013) relies on a central NFS server for storage of media files. It's a single point-of-failure in our infrastructure, and scaling this out to multiple machines is difficult with the current MediaWiki design.

The goal of this project is to build a file store using Swift, and deploy Extension:SwiftMedia which is a new MediaWiki extension that interfaces with Swift file stores.

Roadmap

 * Deploy SwiftMedia for purposes of storing thumbnails: scheduled for the week of February 6th
 * FileBackend refactoring, and modifying SwiftMedia extension to use FileBackend
 * Implement multi-file writing code to write to both NFS store and Swift store
 * Deploy multi-file, primarily serving off of NFS store, while populating Swift store.
 * Switch over to Swift store as primary store
 * Decommission NFS store

Documents

 * Multimedia/Issues
 * Swift page on wikitech – the full details of the Swift deployment.
 * Multimedia/Architecture - currently a list of grievances. Might one day describe our multimedia architecture.

TimedMediaHandler

 * Enabled in November 2012.


 * TimedMediaHandler: An extension to display audio and video files on wiki with timed text support, real time stream switching and server-side transcoding support.
 * Extension:TimedMediaHandler/TestPlan and
 * Multimedia/ReviewNotes