Hi folks,
Thanks for all your helpful feedback about Media Viewer in recent days. We really
appreciate your candid recommendations on our main discussion page (1), as well as on
English and German Wikipedia pages — and survey comments confirm many of the issues you
and other community members have raised.
The multimedia team is taking your feedback to heart, and we are sorry for any
inconvenience caused by this tool. To respond quickly to the most frequent requests, we
have now pushed back other projects to focus on Media Viewer for the next few weeks.
Here are some of the new features we are now developing for you, based on community
suggestions.
1. Disable Media Viewer quickly:
* Instant Opt-in: A more prominent way for registered users to disable Media Viewer,
without having to go to preferences. (#703)
* Opt-out for anons: An easy way for anonymous users to disable Media Viewer, using
localstorage. (#704)
2. View images in larger/different sizes:
* View original file: A prominent button to open the original image in your browser, so
you can zoom in to see its details, or download it for re-use. (#630)
* View different sizes: Prominent links to view images in different sizes from the
Download panel, so you can open them in your browser. (#664)
3. Discover image information:
* Make it easier to find image information: Provide clear visual cues that more
information is available, with links to open the metadata panel. (#706)
* Scrolling down to see more info: Use either up or down arrows to open the metadata panel
below the image, to make it easier to find. (#697)
4. Edit / Learn more on Commons
* Show Commons link to logged out users: Show a prominent link to the Commons file page to
all users, so they can learn more about this image. (#429)
5. Learn to use Media Viewer:
* Add tooltips to Media Viewer: Show more tooltips in Media Viewer, so that users can tell
what each button will do. (#546)
You can view more details about these features on our planning site. (2)
We are working hard to get these changes completed by tomorrow, so we can test them before
releasing them to production. If all goes well, we expect to deploy some of them to the
English Wikipedia and other Media Viewer sites by Thursday evening. The rest of them will
be deployed the following week.
Please let us know what you think on our main discussion page (1). Which of these features
seem most useful to you? Are there other critical features that you think we should
consider next?
Thanks again for all you’ve done already to make this a better product. We are grateful
for all the constructive suggestions we’ve received for our community and look forward to
improving Media Viewer together.
Onward!
Fabrice — for the Multimedia Team
(1) Media Viewer discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#New_featu…
(2) Media Viewer planning site:
http://ur1.ca/gtyrp
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)