We invite you to try Media Viewer, a new tool for browsing multimedia content, which is now in beta on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

Today, viewing images on our sites can be a frustrating experience for casual users: when you click on a thumbnail in an article, you are taken to a separate page where the image is shown in medium size and surrounded with a lot of text information that can be confusing.

Media Viewer aims to improve this viewing experience by showing images in larger size, overlaid on your current page. To reduce visual clutter, all information is shown below the image, and can be expanded at a click of a button.

To see how it works, check out this video demo:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DL02Ry7u-w&t=11m15s; w=640&h=480&rel=0]

Fabrice Florin and Mark Traceur present ‘Media Viewer’ at the Wikimedia Foundation

This new tool is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s multimedia team and we now invite you to try out in beta version. We plan to gradually release this tool in coming months, starting with first pilot tests in April, followed by wider deployments in May.

You can check out Media Viewer on this test page. Click on any thumbnail image to enlarge it. (If you haven’t already,  be sure to sign up or log in, then click on the small ‘Beta’ link in your personal menu to enable ‘Media Viewer’. For more info, read these testing tips.)

Once you’ve tried Media Viewer, please let us know what you think here in the comments, or on this discussion page.

We’re very grateful to all the community members who helped create this feature, through a series of roundtable discussions held in person, on Google Hangouts, as well as on IRC. If you would like to participate in future discussions, we invite you to join our multimedia mailing list.

To learn more, visit our Media Viewer page. Also check out this Multimedia Vision for 2016, to see how this all fits in together with other features in development. We’re building a whole new multimedia layer to help people learn through images, sounds and videos, not just text.

I look forward to more collaborations in coming months. It’s an honor to help improve Wikipedia with our community — and to create a better experience together!

Enjoy …