Author: vladjohn2013
Description:
Allow smoother and easier Wikimedia Commons pictures discovery
Skills: Programming. Design.
Wikimedia Commons is 14 million media repository, all under a free license or in public domain. This is a common repository used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and available for any other projects in need of educative or informational pictures.
Previous usability and UI effort were focused on the upload process and image reusing.
This project is to think, design and develop a better interface to browse and discover pictures, from a user perspective. For example, it has been suggested to implement a lightbox system to switch to the next picture in the categories. A part of the project could be to prepare an external website to implement this lightbox and so offer a similar browsing experience than other popular pictures sites. If the interface works well, a second phase could be to integrate it directly to Wikimedia Commons.
Another idea is a view mode allowing to browse a root category (e.g. the cats category or the roses category and to be able to see pictures in this category and also the subcategories). This will satisfy the need "I want a cat photo" or "I want a rose photo" without having to browse a dozen of specialized subcategory. In a second step, we could filter result with available information. If you're interested to implement this approach, your project could be whether:
the design and development of the viewer mode, with a focus on the UI and ergonomic browser capability to prepare this second step and identify the most relevant criteria (weight, resolution, taken date, color information, most used files on wikis, images with labels) and analyze cost/benefits to cache these data; prepare a prototype with a subset of 1000 images to help to create a performance model and see how in the future have this information could be available for several millions of pictures.
Mentor: Sébastien Santoro
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement