Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-11-29/Technology report

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We really need to offer more powerful (and well-maintained) upload tools, for both indivudal and institutional users. The fact that nobody owns this issue at the moment is simply crazy, also considering the Strategic Direction. --Gnom (talk) 16:24, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, except that I'm not sure how the Strategic Direction is helpful in that regard - are you referring to this very brief mention there: "... there are many external factors that we must account for to plan for the future. Many readers now expect multimedia formats beyond text and images"? Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:38, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

@HaeB: Well, the first sentence of the Strategic Direction says that we want to become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. Allowing people to easily and professionally upload files on Commons is a pretty basic building block for an "essential infrastructure", I'd say. --Gnom (talk) 23:30, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

@Gnom: If this kind of handwavy interpretation of generic language from the strategy documents is the best we can do, then they are even less useful than I thought for the purpose of actually prioritizing work of strategic importance. I mean, I fully agree with you in this case, but it's easy to imagine the same nine words from the Strategic Direction (which are even less concrete than the WMF's mission statement) being similarly cited in support of all kinds of other less impactful efforts. A strategy that doesn't facilitate meaningful prioritization is not worth much.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:19, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

• For more technically inclined readers, more details on the "recent issue" and the incident postmortem is at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/2021-11-04_large_file_upload_timeouts . Short version: the slow large file uploads were in place for 9 months before being fixed (granted, it was hard-to-find invisible blue smoke at fault - a Debian upgrade apparently quietly turned on HTTP/2 which had slow upload speed for... reasons). Pretty sure that hiring a few extra backend engineers would be a more productive use of Wikimedia Foundation donations then whatever else they're using it for... SnowFire (talk) 01:27, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

• A user-friendly way of helping people to upload images is Wikiportret, an initiative of Wikimedia Nederland. Users are guided along copyright and other issues. Description of the project here, Results here. -- Vysotsky (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

As Amir said in his excellent recent rant: "And it all boils down to not having a dedicated team on multimedia but in all fairness, it's not something you can fix overnight. You need to grow, hire, plan, etc. etc."

On that note, this Signpost article's otherwise great historical context section should have mentioned that starting in the mid 2010s, the WMF already had a dedicated multimedia team for a while (which the article alludes to in veiled form further down, but doesn't go into). Its formation was motivated by many of the same issues that persist today, see this 2013 announcement: "Breaking through walls of text: How we will create a richer Wikimedia experience [...] There has never been a well-resourced team fully dedicated to multimedia engineering work at the Wikimedia Foundation. This is about to change. ..." Of the challenges listed there eight years ago, the team successfully addressed some (in particular the lack of "a standard lightbox viewer for media embedded in an article"), but then was pulled into other directions and later dissolved before making any serious impact on the video UX or, apparently, the technical issues discussed in this Signpost article.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 01:21, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@HaeB: I remember back when MediaViewer was going to be a "quick win" before working on more complicated projects. ROFL. Bawolff (talk) 07:35, 11 January 2022 (UTC)