Commons:WMF support for Commons/Upload Wizard Improvements

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.

Goals of the project

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.

Focuses of the project

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T358765

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T347298

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.

Discovery of the problem

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.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T340546

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”.

• 
  July 2023 report about issues in uploading images on Commons
• 
  September 2023 report about interviews with Commons administrators

Design proposals

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.

• 
  November 2023 report about the usability tests conducted on the proposed improvements to UploadWizard
• 
  March 2024 about the usability tests conducted on the proposed improvements to UploadWizard

Success criteria

• Qualitative feedback from users, user testing of upload process improvements
• Decrease in the percentage of uploaded media that trigger deletion requests

What’s out of scope?

• 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

Screenshots & Prototypes

Choosing "Own work" vs. "Not own work" workflow

• 
  Mockup of the proposed modifications to "Release rights" screen
• 
  Mockup of the proposed modifications to "Own work" screen
• 
  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

• 
  Describe as last step in UploadWizard
• 
  Changes to "caption" and "description"
• 
  Changes to "description"

• 
  Changes to "depicts" and "additional info"
• 
  Changes to "published date"
• 
  Changes to final upload confirmation page

Project contacts

If you want to know more about the project or to ask a question, you can reach out to:

• Benedict Udeh, Community Relations Specialist
• Luca Martinelli [Sannita], Community Relations Specialist