The WIkimedia Foundation is thinking about some changes it can make to the way multimedia works on Wikipedia, and has shared its vision for some possibilities for the next couple of years. It looks like the experience will be getting much more social.

“The Wikimedia Foundation’s Multimedia team was formed to provide a richer experience and support more media contributions on Wikipedia, Commons, and MediaWiki sites,” says the foundation’s multimedia team on its blog. “We believe that audio-visual media offer a unique opportunity to engage a wide range of users to participate productively in our collective work.”

“To inform our plans, we’ve created a simple vision of how we might collaborate through multimedia by 2016,” the team adds. “This hypothetical scenario was prepared with guidance from community members and is intended for discussion purposes, to help us visualize possible improvements to our user experience over the next three years.”

Take a look:

The video shows a user being able to give feedback on images and join a media contest as well as contribute a video from her mobile device and share it. Another user searches for relevant media for an article, curates a file and uses the first user’s video in the article. The first user is sent a notification, and the two users end up collaborating on a slideshow.

These are meant to illustrate specific examples of ways that Wikipedia could be used for sharing and collaborating on multimedia, as this is going to be an area of focus over the coming years.

The foundation plans to host discussions to focus on requirements needed for making the vision shown in the video a reality. As listed by the multimedia team, these include: a better viewing experience, more video and audio in general, smoother uploads, structured data, easy feedback, group editing, social interactions and cross-wiki integration.

Image via YouTube