A new way to share pictures, sounds and video

On April 15, Wikimedia Commons celebrated its 10 millionth media file. A new feature will help to increase that number even faster. The upload wizard, which entered public beta in late November and has been used to upload more than 10,000 files already, is now the default upload tool on Wikimedia Commons. Use it and tell us what you think, as we continue to improve it.
Here’s what’s different:

• Instead of overloading the user interface with information about licensing and acceptable content, there’s a single comic strip tutorial explaining the licensing policy, which can be dismissed after the first time you see it.
• You only see complexity when you need to see it. There are sensible defaults for licensing, automatic metadata extraction from the uploaded files, etc.
• You can upload up to 10 files as a batch, instead of having to upload each file individually. You can see thumbnails of the files you’re uploading, and abort any individual upload.
• Error cases should be handled in a clear and understandable fashion, and guide the user towards the most sensible action (e.g. when a file needs to be renamed, the upload shouldn’t fail: instead, the tool will prompt that a rename is necessary).
• As a final step, the UploadWizard explains how to add uploaded files to pages in Wikimedia projects.

And here’s what some of our experienced users have said during the beta:

• “The upload wizard provides a much less cluttered and confusing upload process.”
• “Great performance from the upload wizard. A lot of the more tiresome details are filled out automatically”
• “Fantastic wizard makes process clearer, but please keep the old form for more experienced users. Thanks!”
• “I never thought the old uploading process was too hard, but this new upload wizard is amazingly simple. It actually makes me want to upload more.”
• “Much improved method of uploading files. Multiple file uploads, auto filling of dates, user name, etc, simplifies license input, all help to reduce time required to upload. Great work.”

The UploadWizard requires JavaScript (if JavaScript is disabled, you’ll get a simplified upload form instead). It’s been fully translated into Dutch, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Interlingua, Macedonian, Malayalam, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian,Tagalog, and Vietnamese (call for translations). Tell us what you think — and remember, if it doesn’t work for you, you can always go back to the old form. In the coming weeks, we’ll not only examine the impact that this new tool will have on the overall number of media uploads, but also whether it will lead to a larger percentage of deleted content (due to lower quality uploads). We will continue to improve the tool as we learn more.
Big thanks to the UploadWizard team — Neil Kandalgaonkar, Ryan Kaldari, Guillaume Paumier, Alolita Sharma — and to all code reviewers, operations engineers, translators and testers for their work on this project so far. We hope that you’ll enjoy the new upload experience. If you have images, sound files or videos with educational value that you’re willing to donate to the world, now is a good time to do it.
Erik Moeller, Deputy Director

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