Commons talk:Multimedia Features/Media Viewer/Archive

Here is an archive of earlier comments made about Media Viewer early in our development.

Most of these comments were addressed in the latest version that is now available for testing. Please add any new issues on the main discussion page. Thanks!

Wikipedia Zero

Am looking into the possibility of putting copies of Open Access papers used as references on Wikipedia (the ones under a CC BY license ) on Wikipedia. This would tie into and allow those accessing Wikipedia by Zero to verify some of the text they read. It would also allow them to get involved with editing Wikipedia.

An mock up is here w:en:Hookworm_vaccine with ref number two having a "view on wikipedia" that takes you to w:en:Hookworm_vaccine/16187734. Would be better to have this content on Wikisource / Commons so that it could be shared easily between language versions. James Heilman, MD (talk) 08:53, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

some of the wikipedia zero folks don't get images. However, ignoring that, what does this have to do with media viewer? Bawolff (talk) 11:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Dealing with descriptions in multiple languages

As you know, especially the better curated files here, often have descriptions in many languages. As there is no native support in MediaWiki for dealing with this, the Commons community has created its own conventions for supporting this. How will the new, presumably default, feature deal with this? There is no mention on the specification page, or in the minimum viable product to deal with this.

See example page (today's features image) with descriptions in 6 languages: File:Cucurbita moschata Butternut 2012 G2.jpg.

The same goes for displaying assessment (also applicable to to the above linked image) like features images, or images for deletion, i.e. the templates that have extremely prominent locations at main namespace items in the projects that mainly deal with text. Siebrand 06:06, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

The latest info I have is that Bawolff is working on some API for fetching the description in desired languages that should serve as a bridge until we have a more structured database. Deletion notifications are to be somehow broadcasted through a special Notifications-feature. -- Rillke^(q?) 08:27, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughtful responses, Siebrand and Rillke. Yes, Bawolff has indeed written a CommonsMetadata API to extract metadata from Commons pages, so we may display it in the Media Viewer. The first implementation of this extension applies per-language conventions to dates and other data. Additionally, for explicitly multi-lingual fields (e.g. description), we provide an option to return all languages, or just a single language. The Media Viewer will aim to only show descriptions in a single language, as outlined in this story card. We also aim to display some assessment information in the Media Viewer, as outlined in this story card, though it's unlikely that will be part of our first release. Rillke is correct that this approach is a temporary solution until we have a more structured database, which we aim to work on with the WikiData team in 2014. Thanks again for your hepful feedback. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Universal usability and the ripple effect on other wikis

I get nervous when people start talking about improving media interfaces, adding lightboxes, etc. Many of these cool features break universal accessibility guidelines in subtle or major ways. This includes the obvious needs of people with various disabilities (motor skills, vision, hearing, cognitive, etc.), people with limited bandwidth or otherwise browse with JavaScript, CSS, images, and/or colors disabled or otherwise limited.

Also, how are these enhancements going to trickle through to sister wikis that display the descriptions from Commons? And what about non-sister wikis? I run a few different MediaWiki installations, and all of them share Commons as their media repository. I have no plans to activate Media Viewer on those sites (at least not until it's a very stable feature that has been proven beneficial to other sites), and I would be rather upset if a change in the descriptions and viewing of files here ends up making changes to my installations. At least I am aware of a possible change, but I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other MW installations out there that do the same thing and won't be following any of our changes.

I really appreciate the work that folks have done, and I am all for improving the readers' experiences here, but not at the expense of making the site less usable or disrupting unsuspecting Webmaster (at least not without making it an opt-in feature rather than opt-out). —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 10:35, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

backwards compatibility with old wikis using instant commons is very important. We (we being mediawiki developers in general) would not intentionally commit code that threatened that. (Your accessability point is also very important, but ill let the multimedia team answer that one). Bawolff (talk) 11:55, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Willscrlt, thanks for your good recommendations about accessibility and backwards compatibility. As Bawolff points out, we always strive to make sure new features won't harm existing installations of the MediaWiki software. Also note that the Media Player will only be available to users on an opt-in basis at first, as part of the upcomind Beta Features program, until it has been fully tested across all wikis we support. We appreciate your reminder to support universal accessibility guidelines with this tool. Based on your suggestion, I have filed this new ticket, so we can address these issues in our next development sprints. Note that we may not be able to support all use cases you brought up, but can aim to disable the tool for cases we can easily detect (e.g. no JS or CSS). Thanks again for your helpful feedback. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for filing that ticket. In addition to the ones you mentioned, if you can detect when someone is using a screen reader or a Braille reader (both commonly used by blind users), that might be a good time to disable the MV. —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 10:30, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

The Viewer will hide the direct link to Commons

Current workflow for viewing files

Hi. The viewer seems to be a very nice tool. But one side effect is that it will "hide" Wikimedia Commons. On the french Wikipedia, when you click on a picture, you are directly sent to the page of the picture in Wikimedia Commons, so people can discover this great database. So it would be important, I think, to make sure a visible link to Commons is present in the viewer.

Best regards. Lionel Allorge (talk) 12:56, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Bonjour, Lionel! Thanks for bringing up this issue. As shown in this mockup, we already plan to display a prominent link to 'View on Wikimedia Commons', right below to the image. So users will be able to access the Commons file page from the Media Viewer, if they want to find out more. The current user experience is confusing to casual users, because they do not understand why clicking on a thumbnail takes them to another site, when all they wanted was to see a larger image, as shown in these workflow diagram to the right. We have discussed this at length with other French Wikipedia community members such as Trizek and Jean-Fred, and we seem to agree that Media Viewer is likely to provide a better user experience that is more compatible with best practices and user expectations. But note that this tool will only be available on an opt-in basis, as part of our Beta Features program, so we will all have a chance to test this together and tweak the feature as needed. To be continued. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Speaking as someone who runs a few non-WMF wikis on my own servers, your idea is something I would want to disable. I am quite happy to have a link to Commons appear in the description like it does now, but I would not want my local description to disappear and have visitors suddenly be transported to Commons. On the other hand, if I was running a smaller WMF wiki, it might be a very nice thing to be able to have files go directly to Commons, much like a regular (non-soft) redirect works now. I don't know if it would be possible to have a link that takes you back to the local page from Commons (like you can get back to the redirecting page if you really want to), but that would be quite helpful if such an automatic redirect for files to Commons were to occur. —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 18:58, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Willscrlt, thanks for your suggestions. We will consider them along with feedback from other webmasters, to determine the best course of action. If a lot of wikis want the site link to be configurable, it may be possible to support local configurations. But from an end-user perspective, there are distinct benefits to having a consistent user experience across sites, so we would like to hold off on local configuration discussions until we have heard from a lot of users across a wide range of sites. Sound good? Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

If it's not possible to configure the site link locally, then will it at least be possible to disable the media viewer? Some kind of flag in LocalSettings.php might be easy to implement. If set to false, then don't even bother to load the full class. That might be an easy first-round "fix" for Webmasters who want Commons as their repository, but not the Media Viewer. —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 10:33, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

the current implementation is as an extension. Well its possible for that to change, atm 3rd party wikis are unlikely to be affected unless they specifically install the extension. Bawolff (talk) 11:56, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Make license and author copy-paste-able

Please make the license and author/attribution copy-paste-able. This would hopefully reduce the copyrightviolations caused by reusers who are not aware of the legal consequences of their actions, are too lazy to read through com:reuse, or simply don't understand the whole point of attribution. It should be as simple as possible to reuse any file from Wikimedia Commons without getting sued. Therefore the credit line or attribution (if available; otherwise: author and license) should be parsed and highlighted in the Media Viewer. --McZusatz (talk) 15:59, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Excellent idea. I'd suggest going a step further, and making a button or link that (at least for JavaScript enabled browsers) preloads the clipboard with the attribution information. Of course, being a person who is picky about how I'm attributed, the author should be able to customize the default attribution is s/he wants to. Maybe this could all be handled with a template, but even if so, the new Media Viewer should support such a template. —Willscrlt ( Talk | w:en | b:en | meta ) 18:52, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Jup, we'd have to find all ways how one can possibly express their desired attribution. (Or even better: Only make one way possible to request attribution, which sounds like a lot of work)

For the first option let's start the forever incomplete list:

• {{cc-xx|attribution=}}
• {{Credit line}}
• Default: In this case I guess we'd have to take the author from the {{description}} or the uploader
• ...
• Countless individual templates created by users...

--McZusatz (talk) 19:14, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your interesting ideas, McZusatz and Willscrit. Displaying license info in the Media Viewer is a bit tricky, because currently attribution and license info is stored on Commons in an unstructured format, in many different ways. So may not be able to offer this type of feature until we implement structured data on Commons and streamline the use cases to become more manageable. For our first release of Media Viewer, we plan to display the author and/or source name (scraped from the 'Information' template on Commons), as well as limited license info with a simple label (e.g.: CC-BY-3.0) based on the file's licensing category, linking to the Commons file info page for more licensing details. Sadly, it's simply not practical for us to scrape and parse all the various licensing templates on the file info page at this time, particularly since we plan to do this again when we restructure all data on Commons next year. So as much as we like this copy-and-paste idea, it's not likely that we could implement it right away. Though we have been considering an 'embed' button that would make this possible in the future, as most large multimedia sites do nowadays. Down the line, we are also considering an 'Add' button that would make it easier to use a file on any page, and which could include a similar feature. See also Trizek's proposal on this MediaWiki talk page, which we are also investigating. Thanks again, and look forward to continuing this discussion as this feature evolves ... Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 02:31, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Pictures with transparency

The media viewer should use a white background for transparent images, not a black one! See my Glacier FP nomination for an example—when you click on it it opens the picture on top of a black background.—Love, Kelvinsong talk 02:38, 29 December 2013 (UTC)