Prototype upload wizard unveiled for Wikimedia Commons

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If you’ve ever tried to upload a file to Wikimedia Commons, you may have grown frustrated. Our new upload wizard aims to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia projects, and the first test results look promising.
Wikimedia Commons is the media library associated with Wikipedia; it is a central repository for all Wikimedia projects, and any media file shared there can be used in any Wikipedia page in any language. Wikimedia Commons is curated by a multilingual community and recently reached 7 million files.
Wikimedia Commons relies on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Because MediaWiki was primarily developed for text-based content like Wikipedia articles, contributing multimedia works has always been a challenge.
In July 2009, the Ford Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve the tools and workflows related to multimedia participation. The following Multimedia usability project started in October with a phase of preliminary research, and we worked with the Wikimedia community to identify the key issues and design solutions.
Over the past few months, Neil Kandalgaonkar (NeilK) has been implementing the interface we designed. The result is a prototype upload wizard that we’re happy to share now with the community.

Image (1) upwiz.png for post 2254
Screenshot of the Upload wizard

We recently conducted a User experience study, both to evaluate the current upload interface and to make a first check on our prototype. Our first results look promising and show a clear improvement over the current interface (watch the videos); we’re hoping to share the full videos in the coming weeks. We’ve also taken into account the informal feedback already provided by the first community testers.
The prototype isn’t finished yet, but we feel it’s important to continue to include the Wikimedia community in the ongoing development of our tool. We would like to invite you to test the prototype, read the Questions & Answers page, and share your comments and questions on the feedback page (after checking the list of existing bugs and improvements we’re already working on).
We thank in advance every user who will help us provide better tools and interfaces for the Wikimedia contributors. The prototype is located at http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org.
Guillaume Paumier, Multimedia Usability Team

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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i enjoy what you are doing for the betterment of human beings.
Excellent indeed !
Keep it up…..

Why did you co-opt an existing usability feedback page and repurpose its scope for just your upload wizard project?

[…] Prototype upload wizard unveiled for Wikimedia Commons (wikimedia.org) […]

Powers: The “Usability issues and ideas” page has always been intended as a central place of communication between the Multimedia usability team and the community of Commons, and it’s precisely for this purpose that we’re using it now for the feedback on the upload wizard. The scope of the page was temporarily expanded for the feedback on Vector only because it was convenient. I would hardly call it “co-opting” the page, it was more “sharing” the page with our co-workers from the Wikipedia usability initiative when they needed it.