Greetings!
I’m happy to announce that we just enabled Media Viewer by default on nine more pilot
sites: Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Slovak, and Vietnamese
Wikipedias.
1. Overview
We’re releasing Media Viewer gradually, a few wikis at a time, to test it carefully before
deploying to the next batch of sites. So far, the tool has been well received on our first
pilot sites: Catalan, Hungarian and Korean Wikipedias, as well as on English Wikivoyage,
as outlined below. Next Thursday, we plan to deploy to some of our first large wikis:
Dutch, French, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish Wikipedias. Learn more about this release
plan here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
2. Metrics
We’re now logging about 336,000 image views per day on a global basis, as shown on this
graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv
About half of these views are coming from the Hungarian Wikipedia, and the rest from
Wikimedia Commons, English Wikipedia and other pilots. More metrics dashboards are
available for selected sites on this page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Metrics
3. Performance
We are now tracking image load performance globally, and fist results suggest that images
take over a second to load on average (50th percentile), but can take up to 5 seconds when
looking at worst case for most users (90th percentile), as shown in this graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv_performance_image_global
We’re also encouraged by early comparisons of the time it takes to open an image with
Media Viewer versus on a Commons File, the current default: the mean load times for these
two methods seem to be very close, on the order of 2-3 seconds on a cold cache, as shown
in this preliminary graph:
http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv#media_viewer_vs_file_p…
4. Surveys
We are now running surveys in multiple languages, to validate whether or not this feature
is useful to readers and editors alike. Overall response so far is generally favorable.
Here are the current results:
* English Survey: 64% find the tool useful, 12% don’t find it useful, 24% are not sure
(50)
* Hungarian Survey: 47% find the tool useful, 47% don’t find it useful, 5% are not sure
(268)
* Catalan Survey: 62% find the tool useful, 15% don’t find it useful, 23% are not sure
(13)
We’re also starting new surveys in French, German and Portuguese. You can find links to
live results and comments from all these surveys here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey#Results
5. Usability
For the past few months, we have been running a series of usability studies, with positive
results. Testers are typically able to complete most common tasks successfully, and they
have helped us find new ways to improve the user experience for areas they found
confusing.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Usability_testing
6. Your feedback
How can we improve Media Viewer? Are there any critical issues that should be addressed
for this first release? Please let us know what you think of this tool — and join other
users from around the world on this discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
We’d also be grateful if you could take this quick survey, to let us know how Media Viewer
works for you. It only takes a minute and means a lot to us:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/media-viewer-1?c=email
Many thanks to all the team and community members who made this launch possible!
Enjoy,
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
P.S.: New improvements take about 2 weeks to get deployed to all wikis. If you would like
to test the latest version of Media Viewer, follow the test tips on this demo page on
MediaWiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)