Part of the Commons support for the Fiscal Year 2023-2024 will be directed towards
improving the current user experience with UploadWizard
as part of
objective and key result 1.2
(“Complete improvements to four workflows that improve the experience of editors with extended rights”).
The target audience for this project is primarily focused on new users, but we are welcoming feedback from more experienced users.
The problem we want to solve is how to reduce the number of bad uploads through UploadWizard, so that we can reduce the number of deletion requests, and in perspective, reduce the burden on moderators and improve the quality of our content.
Our aims are:
- To improve the Commons upload experience for users;
- To attempt to decrease the burden for contributors with extended rights, by minimizing the possibility of uploading media that might trigger a deletion request.
This project has focused in the first months on UploadWizard design improvements, starting from the user research results we conducted and improving our initial designs with a community consultation. Our goal was to make it clearer to new users how to provide the right information when uploading new media, reducing the possibility of uploading material that would be flagged for deletion.
During these first months, we focused on the “own work” versus “not my own work” workflows, which also included improving option selection and exploring the possibility of adding machine detection “speed bumps.”
We are now focusing on the section of UploadWizard where users get to describe and add captions to the media they are uploading. In parallel, we are investigating how to programmatically detect and flag potentially problematic content in UploadWizard.
In July 2023, we
conducted a user research
with participants from 12 countries about the common issues users face when uploading images. The report highlighted several points in which the experience of uploading new media on Wikimedia Commons can be improved, giving more context and explanations about licensing and the general rules of the project, explaining better what to do when uploading media that is not the own work of the uploader, and possibly revamping the current UploadWizard to make it more user friendly.
We then
conducted interviews with Commons administrators
, coming from 10 different linguistic communities, about their take on UploadWizard, and the way it is used to upload media. The interviews revolved around the various levels of effort that deletions imply (from speedy deletion to more complex copyright issues), the problems arising from the usage of UploadWizard, and what are the expected improvements that administrators suggested to us.
We also conducted
an analysis in July-August 2023
about the most common reasons for deletion requests on Commons. The most common are “copyright violations” (including violations of
freedom of panorama
,
derivative works
and
threshold of originality
), and media “not being within
project scope
”.
We also conducted usability tests about the proposed improvements to UploadWizard. The report highlighted that most of the proposed changes, in fact, improved the understanding of the process by new users, even if it didn’t prevent in all cases a user from uploading a media that would be flagged for deletion. The tests provided us with more ways of improving the work already done, and present a better version of the changes.
- Qualitative feedback from users, user testing of upload process improvements
- Decrease in the percentage of uploaded media that trigger deletion requests
- Full UploadWizard redesign (although more improvements might be considered in the next iterations)
- Optimization of Commons’ deletion queues
- Creation of a new anti-copyvio tool
Choosing "Own work" vs. "Not own work" workflow
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Mockup of the proposed modifications to "Release rights" screen
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Mockup of the proposed modifications to "Own work" screen
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Mockup of the proposed modifications to "Not own work" screen
There is also a prototype of the proposed changes to the "Release rights" workflow, accessible
at the following link
(some links or functions may not work as expected due to prototyping limitation).
Changes to "Describe" workflow
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Changes to "depicts" and "additional info"
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Changes to "published date"
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Changes to final upload confirmation page
If you want to know more about the project or to ask a question, you can reach out to: