Last modified: 2014-02-21 21:28:40 UTC
Allow smoother and easier Wikimedia Commons pictures discovery Skills: Programming. Design. Wikimedia Commons is 14 million media repository, all under a free license or in public domain. This is a common repository used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and available for any other projects in need of educative or informational pictures. Previous usability and UI effort were focused on the upload process and image reusing. This project is to think, design and develop a better interface to browse and discover pictures, from a user perspective. For example, it has been suggested to implement a lightbox system to switch to the next picture in the categories. A part of the project could be to prepare an external website to implement this lightbox and so offer a similar browsing experience than other popular pictures sites. If the interface works well, a second phase could be to integrate it directly to Wikimedia Commons. Another idea is a view mode allowing to browse a root category (e.g. the cats category or the roses category and to be able to see pictures in this category and also the subcategories). This will satisfy the need "I want a cat photo" or "I want a rose photo" without having to browse a dozen of specialized subcategory. In a second step, we could filter result with available information. If you're interested to implement this approach, your project could be whether: the design and development of the viewer mode, with a focus on the UI and ergonomic browser capability to prepare this second step and identify the most relevant criteria (weight, resolution, taken date, color information, most used files on wikis, images with labels) and analyze cost/benefits to cache these data; prepare a prototype with a subset of 1000 images to help to create a performance model and see how in the future have this information could be available for several millions of pictures. Mentor: Sébastien Santoro URL:https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects#Allow_smoother_and_easier_Wikimedia_Commons_pictures_discovery
This proposal has been listed at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects and we are filing a report to gather community feedback and share updates.
I'm not really sure bugzilla is the best venue for feedback on vauge project ideas - bugs should have (a single) well defined problem and what not. Brainstorming and implementation advice feedback is probably better suited to a mailing list or even on wiki (depending on context maybe even an rfc). (This is just my opinion which others probably dont share. I know there are a lot of things saying file bugs for mentorship project) As for comment 0 - lightbox: seems to be treading the same path as multimedia viewer project. Make sure you are not duplicating efforts. Root Category pages: that's somewhat dangerous territory performance wise (e.g. flatening an entire category tree dynamically to infinite depth is out of the question unless you have some fancy way of making it efficient that is beyond me.). I believe improvements can be made in this area if one is clever about it, but this is the type of thing you have to have a solid plan for that can be carefully evaluated before embarking on it. In particular the performance should be analysed analytically for worst case scenario. 1000 images is very far away from the scale we have to work with and wouldn't mean much. For filtering - one possible idea in that area (if you ignore the category flattening aspect) is sorting category by different criteria (e.g. file size). A while ago I did something related to that in a prototype of image rating (combined with liangent's category work) the approach there gets less efficient the more sorting types you add, but if you have a reasonable number its probably fine efficiency wise. (See the sorting method button on http://tools.wmflabs.org/bawolff/whichisbetter/index.php?title=Category:Images ) Making an extension that allows sorting images by various different criteria could make a good mentorship project.
Thank you for your feedback Brian! (In reply to comment #2) > I'm not really sure bugzilla is the best venue for feedback on vauge project > ideas I'm not sure either but so far is the best tool we have found to push raw entries at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects trough a process that may end up in an actual project. I know wiki pages can also be used for this, but in practice Bugzilla turns out to work much better when it comes to get tech community feedback and to start actual planning work. CCing Dereckson, who filed that project idea more a year ago.
I would like to note a precision, as I've just received a mail about that: this project in 2014 has to be built on the top of the Multimedia Viewer, which is now our lightbox / viewer software.
Adding a couple of Multimedia folks, then.
We'd be happy to help explore, but it does seem like there's a lot of duplicated effort here, and with the various search and metadata improvements that are/will be happening this year.
The part until "Another idea" has been done already as part of MultimediaViewer. The part after that does not overlap with current features or roadmap. MultimediaViewer is very much a moving target currently, with major refactoring efforts going on, so developing somthing on top of it would not be a pleasant experience. The plan is to finalize things within a month; we hope to have some sort of plugin system so that community tools/gadgets can be easily integrated, but have no concrete plans yet, see https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/168 . Comments about what sort of functionality should be possible through plugins would be very welcome there.
