Wikimedia Commons Archive

  • Observers behind a semi-transparent glass, looking at a user on a computer, guided by a facilitator

    Wikimedia Multimedia UX testing videos

    Posted on July 23, 2010 | 4 Comments
    Over the past few months, I've been coordinating the preparation of a formal User experience (UX) study for the Multimedia usability project. Basically, it means observing how "real" users interact with the Wikimedia Commons in order to improve it. Videos of the testing have now been published in order to share them with the community.

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  • logo-digikam

    digiKam, the perfect tool for Wikimedia Commons photographers?

    Posted on September 22, 2009 | 7 Comments
    For several years now, I have been a photographer for Wikimedia Commons. Commons is actually the reason why I became interested in photography, and why I bought a DSLR camera and various lenses. And I have ended up taking a lot of pictures. The problem when you take a lot of pictures is that the time you need then to process and upload them grows exponentially. Besides, if you want to upload your pictures to several platforms (say, Commons, flickr and your blog), you have to deal with the specifics of each website. It would be much simpler and faster to describe, tag, classify, geotag the pictures only once (using an appropriate batch-editing tool) and then to have each website extract the metadata, or to use an upload tool that extracts them automatically.

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  • Commons-logo

    Ten features that would dramatically improve Wikimedia Commons

    Posted on June 30, 2009 | 6 Comments
    About two years ago, I said "Commons may be the next coolest project, as soon as developers find the time to improve its usability to make it more user-friendly". Wikimedia Commons hasn't evolved much in terms of usability since then. MIT's Technology Review recently published an article about improvements to come regarding the management of video content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia websites. I heard a lot of people say: "Good, but what about pictures?" Some technical improvements described by the Technology Review will be useful for both images and videos, such as the media and upload wizard currently developed by Michael Dale. However, Wikimedia Commons still needs many little (or big) features that would dramatically improve its user-friendliness.

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