Reading/Multimedia/2014-15 Goals

This is our planning page for the Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team for the 2014-15 fiscal year. This working draft will be updated from time to time, based on community and team feedback.

Warning:

Fairly outdated. See Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Multimedia for an up-to-date version of the quarterly goals.

Please note that some of the goals below are still tentative, and provided here for discussion purposes only. This first proposal is based on this first annual planning meeting, held by our team May 29, 2014 in San Francisco. For more background information, see also our previous year's planning page.

Feel free to add comments, questions and suggestions on this discussion page.

Rationale

Multimedia Vision

Multimedia enables users to learn about the world in vastly different ways than text articles. As modern culture shifts towards more audio-visual delivery of information, images, sounds and videos are key to engaging more users and supporting their diverse learning styles. 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.

In coming years, we aim to build or improve software tools to:

Improve the viewing experience for multimedia content
Enable multimedia contributions in a more seamless way
Provide file feedback and curation tools to manage contribution streams
Help editors discover and add media files to articles on Wikipedia and other projects
Support organizers of multimedia campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments
Upgrade our software infrastructure and repay our 'technical debt' from prior years

Goals

Our specific goals for this year include:

engage more users to contribute media
add more media content on our sites
provide a smoother experience for all
fix critical bugs to make things work better

Users

This year, we propose to focus on these primary user groups:

contributors -- the people who upload media on our sites
editors -- the people who add media on articles

Notes:

We aim to support both casual and experienced users within each group.
We will initially focus on Commons users, then serve users on Wikipedia and other sites.
Secondary user groups include admins, campaign organizers and developers.

Activities

This year, we propose to invest our time on these main activities:

Structured Data - improve the way we store metadata -- critical, because most other features depend on it.
Critical Bugs - fix urgent bugs in our infrastructure -- and become more familiar with our entire code base.
Features - develop or improve user-facing projects, including:
- Upload Wizard -- our main user-facing project this year (includes Commons Upgrade and Modal Tool for other sites)
- Other Features -- Media Viewer 0.3, File Notifications, File Page, Kaltura Player, Feedback, Campaign Tools

Projects

Specifically, we propose to focus on these main projects:

A. Must have:

Upload Wizard - incrementally improve the code and the user experience over time - Q1, Q2, Q3
Structured Data - work with Wikidata and the community to plan, develop code, and migrate data on Commons - Q2, Q3, Q4
Critical Bugs - fix serious issues that need immediate solutions (e.g. image scalers, timed media handler) - heavy in Q1 & Q2, lighter afterwards
Multimedia Metrics - track usage data more effectively, to inform our decisions (e.g. number of uploaders, uploads, files used, drop-off rates, etc.)

B. Should have:

Media Viewer 0.3 - develop missing features, fix bugs (zoom, urgent community requests) - Q3
File Notifications - implement 'your file was used', make many people happy - Q3
File page - update Commons description pages - design in Q2, develop in Q4

C. Could have:

Insert Media - work with other teams (VE, Search) to make it easier to discover and add files to pages - Q4?
Audio/Video Upgrade - Kaltura 2.0 Player update, better error messages - Q4?
Media Viewer 0.4 - support Audio, Video, PDF and other file formats - as time allows
File Feedback - provide positive feedback tool (e.g. 'thanks', 'favorite') - as time allows
Campaign Tools - better integration with WLM and other campaigns - as time allows

Note that these priorities are preliminary and subject to change.

Roadmap

Here are some key milestones we are aiming for fiscal year 2014-2015. These milestones below may be adjusted from time to time, and updated on a quarterly basis, based on prior quarter's results, as well as community and team discussions.

Q1 (July-September)	Upload Wizard - Platform - fix bugs, unit tests, chunked uploads, metadata structure Upload Wizard - Features - progress bar, drag and drop, better FAQ, replace infographic Structured Data - planning with Wikidata, new metadata structure, design file page/editing tools, community discussions Critical bug fixes - Examples: Image scalers, Core media handling, Media Viewer, TimedMediaHandler load on every page Multimedia Metrics - upload funnel analysis, drop-off rate, UI clicks, # uploads, # uploaders, other upload tools, files used
Q2 (October-December)	Upload Wizard - Platform - fix more bugs, separate interface code, metadata-related infrastructure Upload Wizard - Features - better licensing & category tools, add metadata anytime during load Structured Data - implement structured data on Commons with Wikidata and community Critical bug fixes - Examples: Image scalers, Core media handling, Media Viewer, TimedMediaHandler upgrade
Q3 (January-March)	Upload Wizard - Platform - provide modal tool to other teams, cross-wiki uploads (enwiki > commons) Upload Wizard - Features - upload a file from a page, better tools for multiple files Media Viewer 0.3 - develop missing features (zoom, urgent community requests) File Notifications - implement 'your file was used' notification Critical bug fixes - Examples: TimedMediaHandler, Media backend storage, File repo classes, etc.
Q4 (April-June)	Insert Media - work with other teams (VE, Search) to make it easier to discover and add files to pages Audio/Video Upgrade - Kaltura 2.0 Player update, better error messages Media Viewer 0.4 - support Audio, Video, PDF, DejaVu and other file formats File page - update file description pages on Commons to address power user needs Critical bug fixes - Examples: File repo classes, Imageinfo API stuff, JS error logging, Vagrant improvements

Note that these milestones and roadmap are preliminary and subject to change. They will be re-evaluated quarterly, based on previous quarter results, as well as community and team feedback.

Interdependencies

To meet our goals for multimedia, we plan to partner with these other teams:

Wikidata: implement structured data on Commons and other sites
Visual Editor: upload media to articles, find and use existing media
Search: make it easier to find media based on structured data
Mobile: view and upload media on mobile platforms
Kaltura: upgrade audio and video players
Design: improve the user experience / usability
Core Features: upload media to discussions (Flow)
Analytics: improve our metrics

Metrics

Here are key metrics we're considering to track the impact of our work:

number of uploaders
number of uploads
upload drop-off rate
number of files used
number of files viewed