Hi all,
We're pleased to announce Beta Features [1], a new program that lets you
test new features on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites before they are
released for everyone.
Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview
upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special
preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features
on a broad scale, but not in a disruptive manner.
Beta Features is ready for testing now on MediaWiki.org [2]. This Thursday,
we plan to also deploy it on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki. After careful
testing, we aim to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.
Here are the first features you can test this week:
* Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen [3]
* VisualEditor Formulæ — edit algebra or equations on your pages [4]
* Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday) [5]
Would you like to try out BetaFeatures now? After you log in on
MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'.
Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then
click 'Save'. Learn more on the BetaFeatures page. [1]
After you've tested Beta Features, please let us know what you think on our
discussion page [6] -- or report any bugs on Bugzilla [7]. For technical
documentation, visit the BetaFeatures extension page. [8]. You're also
welcome to join our IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 10:30am
PST, 18:30 UTC. [9]
Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia
and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, we will be adding
new features to this experimental program every few weeks.
For now, we'd like to thank some key team members who made this project
possible: Ed Sanders, Jon Robson, Gergő Tisza, May Galloway, Vibha Bamba,
Aaron Schulz, Brion Vibber, Bryan Davis, Chris Steipp, Greg Grossmeier,
Keegan Peterzell, Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier, Erik Moeller, Rob Lanphier,
Howie Fung and Tomasz Finc, to name but a few. We're also very grateful
to all the community and other team members who helped create this system —
and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future. :)
Enjoy, and don't forget to let us know what you think!
Fabrice, James, Mark and Jared
Wikimedia Engineering and Product Group
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/About_Beta_Features
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatu…
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Beta_Features/Formulae
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_Update
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:About_Beta_Features
[7] http://wmbug.com/new?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=BetaFeatures
[8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BetaFeatures
[9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce Gergő Tisza is joining our Mulitmedia team
today as a Software Engineer on the team. He'll be working most
closely with Mark Holmquist and Fabrice Florin on new media handling
features (first up: helping Mark finish off the new Media Viewer). He
joins us most recently from Rocket Internet Gmbh, where he helped
relaunch the company website, and he has several years of PHP
experience before that.
Gergő has been editing Wikipedia for about 9 years, as an anon for his
first year, and then as User:Tgr. He's most active on Hungarian
Wikipedia, but does some editing on the other wikis as well. He's
also active in many other ways: as one of the founding members of
Wikimedia Hungary, serving on the board for some of the time since
then, as well as helping build some of their fundraising
infrastructure. He also helped out with Wiki Loves Monuments, for
example working out a bot to import images off of one of the more
common Hungarian image hosters. He's also been very active in our
Wikimedia Ambassadors group, helping smooth the rollout of several new
features.
He plans to move to San Francisco in the coming months, but will be
splitting his time between Berlin, Germany and Sopron, Hungary until
he can make the move to the U.S.
Welcome, Gergő!
Rob
Hi folks,
We'd like to give you a heads-up about the upcoming release of Notifications (1) on Wikimedia Commons in coming weeks.
This software tool will inform users about new activity that affects them on Commons, in a unified way: for example, it will let you know when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, thanks, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the watchlist. The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this tool (code-named 'Echo') earlier this year, to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects.
Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and have now been successfully deployed on dozens of other wikis in different languages, including the Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese Wikipedias, to name but a few. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. Users are responding particularly well to social features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable them to communicate more effectively than before. Learn more in our recent blog post (2).
We're now getting ready to bring Notifications to Wikimedia Commons and other sister sites, and are aiming for an October 22 deployment for our first release. This release will include some basic features shared by all other sites. Our multimedia team is also considering developing a few special notifications for Commons (e.g.: 'Your file was used in an article'), and we will start a community discussion about these ideas after our first release.
Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this new tool in this Village Pump thread:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Notifications_on_Co…
Thanks, and stay tuned for more.
Fabrice
(1) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)
(2) http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedia…
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Greetings!
We'd like to invite you to join our multimedia IRC chat this Thursday, August 22 at 18:00 UTC (11:00am PDT), on this 'office hours' channel: #wikimedia-office .
During this one-hour chat, we will talk about our plans for multimedia in the coming year, as discussed during this Wikimania 2013 roundtable:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_3
We would also like to discuss this proposed Media Viewer, as described here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer
For more information about our new multimedia initiative, visit this project hub:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
Thanks for your interest. We hope to speak with you soon!
All the best,
Fabrice and the Multimedia Team
P.S.: For more info on how to join this IRC chat, check this IRC office hours page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
Wikipedia Profile:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Greetings -- and welcome to our multimedia list!
As discussed last week on the Wikivideo-l list, all 90+ subscribers to that Wikivideo-l list have now been added to this new Multimedia mailing list.
The purpose of this new mailing list is to discuss software tools that support the viewing, contribution, curation, discovery and use of multimedia content on Wikipedia, Commons and other MediaWiki projects.
Participants include team members from the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as volunteers from the Wikipedia, Commons and other wiki communities. We all share an interest in adding images, sounds and videos to our free knowledge base.
In coming days, we will start posting here about some of our first plans for new multimedia features and infrastructure improvements, and hope to improve these plans and software tools with your help.
We welcome your comments, but please be civil and only post on the topic of multimedia. To contribute to this list, all you need to do is send an email to <multimedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org>.
You can manage your subscription to this list on this page:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia
To learn more about our current work, visit this multimedia project hub:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia.
We look forward to some great conversations with you!
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
P.S.: Many thanks to TheHelpfulOne for setting up this list for us. Much appreciated!
Greetings!
I hope you're well and enjoying your summer.
It's been a month since we started our new multimedia program at the Wikimedia Foundation, and we'd like to give you a quick update about our work, as well as invite you to join some of our upcoming discussions.
Here's our monthly report on July's activities and upcoming projects:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia#Status
If you are going to Wikimania in Hong Kong this year, consider joining our roundtable discussion this Thursday, August 8th, at 10:00am local time:
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Multimedia_Roundtable
We will also host another public discussion on IRC later this month, on Thursday, August 22nd, at 19:00 UTC:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
These discussions will bring together community members and developers to discuss how to create a better multimedia experience on Wikipedia and Commons. With your help, we plan to create new ways to view, contribute, curate, discover and use or share media files -- and grow our audio-visual knowledge base in the process.
We hope you can join one of these discussions, which we also plan to host on-wiki. Through these conversations, we aim to review current multimedia workflows on Commons and Wikipedia, and identify together some key issues and features that can help us grow our media ecosystem in coming years.
Thanks again for your interest in this project. We look forward to talking with you soon!
All the best,
Fabrice and the Multimedia Team
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)