In May 2011, we announced a new way to share pictures, sounds, and video: the Upload Wizard. A year later, Upload Wizard has been used to upload more than 1 million freely licensed media files and has contributed to an acceleration of growth of the Wikimedia Commons community.

Countering the decline in retention of new contributors to Wikipedia, the number of contributors to Wikimedia Commons (individuals who make at least one upload) grew by about 25% from March 2011 to March 2012, compared with ~12% in the prior year. We attribute this growth primarily to two factors: the introduction of the Upload Wizard, and the successful “Wiki Loves Monuments” competition in September 2011, highlighted on the graph below.

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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

Today, we’re launching a new upload wizard in beta phase to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia Commons. “Commons” is the free, collaborative media repository associated with all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Although Commons contains over 7 million images, videos and sounds, uploading a file has long been an arduous path reserved to the most adventurous souls. The new upload wizard aims to make the uploading experience simpler and more pleasant for all users.

The upload wizard allows multiple files to be uploaded at the same time.

The new upload tool consists of a step-by-step wizard guiding the user through the successive stages of the process, rather than presenting a huge complicated form. It allows the user to upload multiple files at once, and grant permission for them in batch.

The wizard integrates our brand new illustrated licensing tutorial to help new participants understand the basics of copyright and free licenses. Since its publication, the tutorial has been translated and localized into about eighteen languages, and more are underway.

This new feature is one of the main outcomes of the Multimedia Usability project, a one-year project funded by the Ford Foundation, aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites. Although the grant is now officially over, the Wikimedia Foundation will fund subsequent development of the wizard to make it more robust and feature-rich.

We unveiled a prototype version of the wizard a few months ago, and we’ve got a lot of useful, constructive feedback from Commons testers. Since then, many bugs have been fixed, and the interface is much cleaner. The other main accomplishment has been the development of a private temporary holding area for files missing mandatory information.

The upload wizard is available in beta version as an additional uploading option. It’s far from perfect, and there are still bugs and missing features. But we do think it will provide a useful alternative to participants who want to use it and help us improve it.

The new wizard will eventually become the default uploading option on Commons, but it won’t replace the regular upload system until it provides a satisfying (and hopefully improved) coverage of the use cases currently supported by the “old” one.

You’re warmly invited to try the new system (you’ll need an account on Commons) and report issues you encounter with it. Please be sure to save your time by checking the Questions & Answers page and the list of open issues first.

If your issue hasn’t been reported yet, you can enter it directly in our tracker, or leave a note on the feedback page.

Since this concludes the Multimedia usability project, we’ll publish a full project report shortly for people interested in the details. In the meantime, you may be interested in two behind-the-scenes articles about the licensing tutorial: one by our illustrator, Michael Bartalos, and one by myself, focusing on the collaboration with the Wikimedia community.

Guillaume Paumier, Product Manager − Multimedia usability

Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.

You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites.

One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them.

Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format.

This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and suggested many changes to the illustrator.

Sample from the tutorial

You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best.

Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help pages.

The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy.

I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert at.

The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of November.

In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text. We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized artwork.

Guillaume Paumier,
Product Manager – Multimedia Usability Project

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.

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