Community Liaisons/Media Viewer consultation

The Wikimedia Foundation recently launched a new interface for viewing images on Wikimedia projects called Media Viewer. Media Viewer gives readers access to larger images when they click on thumbnails. The tool also provides basic information and a simple browser for other images on the same page. For more details and editing, the user can access the File: page directly from Media Viewer.

Contributors have a significant stake in how information is presented on Wikimedia sites. The objective of this consultation was to identify any critical issues with this new experience, based on your feedback. If agreed upon critical issues cannot be resolved in the near term, the Wikimedia Foundation will temporarily move the feature back into opt-in beta globally.

Consultation period: August 28 – September 7

Consultation results

Screenshot of the Media Viewer's new design prototype [1]

Thanks to all participants for your constructive suggestions to improve Media Viewer.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team has reviewed each of the 130 suggestions from this community consultation and prioritized a number of important development tasks for the next release of this feature. Those prioritized tasks have been added to the improvements list below.

We have already started development on the most critical ('must-have') improvements that you helped identify and that have been validated through user testing (see research findings and design prototype). We plan to complete all “must have” improvements by the end of October and deploy them incrementally, starting this week. See the multimedia team's improvements plan and development planning site for details.

As we release these improvements, we will update everyone through regular posts on the Media Viewer talk page. Please continue to share your feedback after testing these improvements.

Some media files lack machine-readable metadata and you asked us to fix this. To that end, we are launching a file metadata cleanup drive. This will lay the groundwork for the structured data partnership with the Wikidata team, to enable better search and re-use of media in our projects and many other features. We encourage everyone to join these efforts.

Along with my colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation, I thank you for your input in this consultation and look forward to more collaborations with you in the future. Many thanks from all of us! Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer improvements list

Must have

These improvements are critical for this release:

• Make it Opt-In (See Request for Comments/Meinungsbild on Commons, enWP and deWP). This was the number one piece of feedback. The WMF has declined to follow community consensus on this matter. Not done
• A more prominent link to the File: page – see suggestions by Gryllida, Nyttend, Deskana, Jee, 92.229.95.23. Done
• "More Details" should include project icon – see suggestion by Patrick87, Andy king50, Goldzahn. Done
• Enlarge images by clicking on them – see suggestions by Nyttend, Luha, Anika, SlimVirgin. Done
• An easier way for any user to individually disable the tool for their personal use – see suggestion by Orderinchaos. Done
• Re-enable Media Viewer from a File Page – see suggestion by Andy king50, Ultra7. Done
• Rename File page button to better label than "Expand view" – see suggestion by Sminthopsis84. Done
• A caption or description right below the image – see suggestion by 164.40.202.144. Done
• Make MediaViewer text larger in Monobook – see suggestion by Deskana. Done
• Pre-render thumbnails on backend for new uploads – see suggestions by Chewbacca2205, Holger1959, Rich Farmbrough, 84.172.144.1. Done
• Support metadata cleanup drive. File metadata cleanup drive Done

Should have

These important improvements will be considered, if time allows – but may need to be pushed to future releases:

• Attribution prompt improvement – see suggestions by Holger1959 and Gnangarra.
• Show file page link if attribution is missing – see suggestion by Rich Farmbrough. Done
• Fix 'Licensed under Fair Use' credits.
• Additional attribution/licensing improvements consistent with metadata cleanup effort.

Could have

These improvements would be 'nice to have', but are not deemed critical for this release – they will be considered for future releases:

• Adjust the ‘Go back’ function for Media Viewer – see suggestions by Freddie331, Rich Farmbrough.
• Faster access to file names – see suggestions by KuboF and Nyttend.
• Additional performance improvements for users on slow connections.

Selection criteria

Here are the selection criteria we used for adding community suggestions to the improvements list above:

• Importance: Can this suggestion significantly improve the experience for target users: readers and casual editors?
• Feasibility: Can this suggestion be practically implemented with available resources in the short term? (or does it require an extraordinary or long-term investment?)
• Validation: Is this suggestion confirmed by research data or frequent requests from target users? (e.g. validated through user studies, surveys or talk pages)
• Support: Is this suggestion supported by many community members? (e.g. editors on talk pages) This feature primarily targets readers, but we recognize that issues many contributors care about should be taken into account.

Members of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Multimedia and Community Engagement (Product) teams participated in the discussion page (recognizable by the “(WMF)” in their usernames). Final decisions on which improvements to prioritize were made by the multimedia team, based on the above criteria. While there is no perfect formula for determining which features to build first, we carefully considered the trade-offs between impact and cost, and aimed to validate each decision based on user data or feedback.