Greetings!
Here’s our weekly update on what our multimedia team is working on. We hope you
find this report helpful.
1. Media Viewer Releases
Today, we just enabled Media Viewer (1) by default on Wikimedia Commons. Next
week, we will release the tool on the English, German, Italian and Russian
Wikipedias, as well as WikiSources in all languages; if all goes well, we plan
to roll out on all wikis the following week, as outlined in our release plan
(2). Overall response has been largely favorable, as reported before (3).
Please share your feedback on the discussion page (4).
2. Last week’s sprint
Last week, we worked mostly on Media Viewer and Tech Debt (GWToolset and Image
Scaler issues), as outlined in our meeting notepad (5). On the Media Viewer
front, we fixed a number of bugs, upgraded our metrics with a global image view
dashboard (6), investigated then ruled out a simple zoom link, and estimated
the server load of Media Viewer when deployed to all wikis (7). On the
Technical Debt front, we fixed bugs for the GW Toolset, and added a throttle to
prevent it from processing too many images at once; we also investigated root
causes of the recent Image Scaler outage, identifying a few promising solutions
to work on next.
3. This week’s sprint
This week, we’re planning to split our time evenly between Media Viewer, Tech
Debt and Upload Wizard work, as shown in our current sprint board (8). For
Media Viewer, we’ll make it easier to discover metadata and add more tooltips
to address community requests, as well as run more tests in different browsers
like IE9. For Tech Debt, we’ll start generating reference thumbnails to save
CPU time on image scalers, as well as lower the frequency of GWToolset jobs.
For Upload Wizard, we’re starting to collect usage data on key steps in the
upload workflow, as part of a funnel analysis that will tell us where people
drop off most often; we’re also analyzing the feedback and bugs backlog, to
identify major pain points -- and generating first design ideas to address
them; lastly, we’re getting UploadWizard ready for jQuery 1.9, so we can get
more familiar with the current code base.
4. Next steps
Through the middle of June, we plan to gradually spend more time on Upload
Wizard, once Media Viewer has been successfully deployed, as shown in our
current cycle board (9). In coming weeks, we will host a number of community
discussions to prioritize key issues and review possible solutions together.
Based on this feedback, we aim to implement some of the most promising
solutions through the end of the summer.
5. Thanks
We’re very grateful to all the community and team members who keep guiding our
progress at each step of the way. We couldn’t do this work without you -- and
consider ourselves lucky to have such great partners. Today, we would like to
give special thanks to Aaron Arcos, a former Google employee who volunteered
for 5 months with our team, and was a wonderful coach and collaborator: he
helped us focus on quality, refine our agile development process and get
serious about unit testing, as described in the exit video he put together,
with interviews from our team (10).
We look forward to more great collaborations with you all. :)
Be well,
Fabrice - for the Multimedia Team
(1) About Media Viewer:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(2) Large Wiki Releases:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Large_Wikis
(3) Survey Report:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey/Results_-_05-05-2014
(4) Media Viewer page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(5) Multimedia Sprint Notes:
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/multimedia-weekly-meeting-2014-05-14
(6) Global Image View Dashboard:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_image_views_global
(7) Global Server Load Estimate:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Metrics/Estimations
(8) Current Sprint: http://ur1.ca/gtyrp
(9) Current Cycle Board: http://ur1.ca/h7w5s
(10) Volunteering at Wikipedia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxW8TMMA05k
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
_______________________________________________
Multimedia mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia
