Talk:Wikimedia Meet

Wikimedia social suite

This should be grouped with wikitech:Tool:Wudele and similar tools to build up our suite of community social tools.--Pharos (talk) 01:30, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

I've started a page for the general concept now: Wikimedia Social Suite.--Pharos (talk) 15:51, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Token request

Hi User:Ladsgroup User:Mahir256 User:Vermont Mehman97 User:Asaf (WMF) 01tonythomas Fuzheado User:Pharos Mauricio V. Genta Eric Luth Majavah Saileshpat Bodhisattwa Michael Pamputt and Abbad, I want to host a session in about 3 hours. Can one of you please send me a token? davidrichfield at gmail . Thanks! --Slashme (talk) 10:53, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Slashme:, is sending it via Special:EmailUser/Slashme ok? – Majavah ^{talk/contribs/sul} 11:10, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Majavah: Sure, that's perfect! --Slashme (talk) 11:25, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Email sent. Please let someone know if you have any issues. – Majavah ^{talk/contribs/sul} 11:27, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

It works, thanks! --Slashme (talk) 11:33, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Notes on getting connected to online meetings

Various Wikimedia online meetings have used Zoom, Google Meet, Jitsi, and perhaps other software platforms. Each one presents its own hurdles, sometimes requiring 5 to 15 minutes of frantically trying different things to get connected online. Following are a few notes and suggestions based on my personal experiences:

1. Some attendees may use an Apple iPad for the meeting connection, because it is the only hardware they have which is equipped with a video camera and a microphone. Some of the meeting software is compatible with the Apple Safari browser, while other software hangs, doesn't connect, or has other problems. The meeting instructions should point out that an alternative browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox may sometimes work better, and should be tried if needed.
2. If the iPad attendee also uses a desktop computer, the larger display and full-sized keyboard may be more appropriate for viewing or editing associated text files and meeting notes. If the desktop runs MacOS, it may be possible to copy text to a shared clipboard and paste it on another computer; this may or may not be feasible on other hardware/opsys combinations. The URL pointers should preferably be short and typeable, since they may need to be manually transcribed to another machine.
3. Meeting invitations should mention that sending outgoing video is optional, and perhaps not recommended if the internet connection is slow or unreliable. Also, outgoing audio should be muted when not in use, especially for larger online meetings.
4. Many attendees use over-the-ear headphones, telephone headsets, internal earbuds, or other audio hardware. Recommendations and coverage of tradeoffs among the different audio hardware options might be helpful to newcomers.

These are just a few offhand ideas that come to mind, and others are invited to add further suggestions and hints based on their own experiences and perspectives. It is possible that somebody has written up much more comprehensive sets of guidelines and hints for attendees of online meetings; please post pointers as appropriate. Reify-tech (talk) 22:57, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Token worked but can't log in

@Ladsgroup: I got a token from User:Bodhisattwa, and was able to create an account (got the "Your account has been created." response message), but when I try to log in with the username and password I gave with the token it says "Incorrect username or password". I'm trying to set up https://meet.wmcloud.org/WikiClubWest for use for WikiClubWest meetups. Are you able to help me? Thanks! —Sam Wilson 06:28, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Samwilson hey, you usually need to wait for five minutes or so but if it's not working, it probably means you used characters in your username/password that the crappy jitsi usesr manager can't understand (https://meet-auth.wmflabs.org/create: "use only English letters and numbers."). If that's the case, I can give you another token to try again. Amir (talk) 06:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: Ah, that must be it: I used a generated password that probably had a bunch of weird things in it! Can you please send me a new token? —Sam Wilson 06:48, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Sent! Amir (talk) 06:59, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Very poor server and videconference quality

I apologise in advance if this is not the convenient place for general and technical feedback. For today, Amical Wikimedia had organised and started an edit-a-thon in the Catalan Wikipedia with the involvement of other relevant institutions (including the Catalan Ministry of Culture, a University and a Museum). The link was a Wikimedia Meet meeting that I have had created during the week as a host. It has been the first time that our affiliate has used this tool for a public event (and I think, if not mistaken, that also overall for our whole communication). Unfortunately, since the beginning of the event the server has provided a really bad stability and disappointing quality, even just with 16 participants that had no microphone or camera activated when they were not talking. No sound, people getting out, stuck images, etc. The quality screen showed that most of us have very good quality internet connection, so I don't think it could be attributed to individual cases.

Hence it just took us 20 minutes to see the need to migrate to a simple Jitsi to be able to proceed with the event successfully. Since we changed to a Jitsi link, the session is working really fine for all meanwhile I write this comment. In my purely personal opinion, which ofc is based in only a first impression but that has an effect in the public outreach and trust towards our GLAM partners, I find that the Wikimedia servers should be able to provide an excellent connection -especially considering that the tool is only partially accessible as it requires a token and a host beforehand- so that it should have capacity enough to hold "internal traffic". I wish this can be further tackled, as it is a highly needed and basic suite to develop the most plain projects in corona times. If the own technical infrastructure is not outstanding, which is the most essential kit for any Wikipedian (volunteer) and where most of the millions of dollars are supposed to be addressed, then any other investment consequently looses sense, optimisation and reliability. Kind regards, Xavi Dengra (MESSAGES) 11:40, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure this is the right place for technical feedback either, but I believe it is useful to report on the same problems we experienced during an online training on Thursday, December 3, at 1PM (Eastern Time), with less than 10 people in the room. We had to use another Jitsi Meet server (meet.jit.si) to continue our training. However, it was our first time experiencing such problems with meet.wmcloud.org. All our previous experiences have been good, including the training we gave just a week before, on Thursday, November 26, also at 1PM (Eastern Time). Mathieugp (talk) 16:36, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: Would it be useful/better to create a full bug report in Wikimedia Phabricator? Mathieugp (talk) 18:03, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mathieugp@Xavier Dengra Hello, thank you for the feedback. This is already known that Wikimedia Meet can't handle large group of people and we have been looking into this already phab:T268393 and phab:T262747 while 16 people is not that much and it should have worked unless you were so unlucky that there was another group having meeting at the same time. Also, keep it in mind that I'm also a volunteer like you, trying this on a VM in the cloud. WMF has not given any official resources (beside the VMs) to me for this. That being said, I tried some ideas this weekend and it might have improved it. It's really hard to test if it can handle lots of people or not and what is the bottleneck to eliminate (VM eth0 interface, WM Cloud network, etc.) Amir (talk) 19:13, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I've been using Jitsy/Meet on a weekly basis since September, as part of this project. Mostly it has been on a comparable level as with Google Hangouts (used weekly during spring and summer), but the experience has degraded. We're 5 to 10 people in the meetings.

Since mid-November we're starting to see a lot of strange behaviour from the system, and the experience has been bad during December. Problems include lost connection (sound and/or video) when others join. Throughout the autumn, the system has been reporting bad and fluctuating quality of Internet connection, often leading to lost video or connection (despite no other Internet service – including streaming video in high resolution – reporting any problem). At this level of performance, Jitsy Meet will sooner or later stop being a viable solution for video meetings. Which is too bad.--Paracel63 (talk) 16:24, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mathieugp@Paracel63@Xavier Dengra: Sorry for the inconvenience, can you take a look again and tell me if it works fine now? Thanks and sorry again. Amir (talk) 13:35, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi! In the next meeting that I have, I will give it a second chance and let you know the feedback here. Thank you for the ping and for the reply, no problem! :) Xavi Dengra (MESSAGES) 14:11, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: I too will give it a try with a few people next chance I have. Thanks! --Mathieugp (talk) 15:31, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: Thanks for your support. Our next weekly meeting will be tomorrow, and we will give it a try and report back. BTW, during the inavailability of WmMeet, we have found this service most usable, and with some interesting capabilities. No one know how long Gather will be around, but right now it's definitely something to fall back to, when other services are unavailabe. All the best.--Paracel63 (talk) 19:42, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Unusable

It's unthinkable helding an event on this website.

I organized an event for the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia.

We were just 11, and nothing worked.

We could'nt hear each other's audio and we could'nt see the screen sharing.

It is not possible recording the meeting.

One extra feedback: please, ask the users to enter an username before joining, instead of giving the default name.

Fortunately, after 15 minutes loss, we were able to use Jitsi Meet instead (the normal one, not the Wikimedia's instance).

This is a good idea, but needs to be fixed. It should work properly.

If you need extra informations, please mention me so that i can notice your answer--ValeJappo【〒】 19:39, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I confirm this feedback. I tried this instance two days ago with three colleagues and every 4-5 minutes the audio/video of a random participant was down each using a different operating system and browser. Never had this kind of issues in the official Jitsi Meeting or in the https://open.meet.garr.it/ provided by the w:GARR or in https://iorestoacasa.work/ provided by w:Fabriano lovers. Personally I tried with Chromium 87 and Firefox 84 on GNU/Linux but other participants had Chrome and Windows with the same issue. I'm available to do some tests together with the sysadmins to simplify troubleshooting because this instance deserves more stability. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 16:16, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Token request, and note on the account creation process

Hello @Ladsgroup, Mahir256, Vermont, Mehman97, Asaf (WMF), 01tonythomas, Fuzheado, Pharos, Mauricio V. Genta, Eric Luth, Majavah, Saileshpat, Bodhisattwa, Michael, Pamputt, and Abbad:.

Some context. So we have a local online workshop tomorow. It was supposed to be held through the WMFR BigBlueButton instance, but due to a major incident at the hosting (physical) site, it's currently out of order. So I'm looking for what we might use instead.

That makes a first answer to why I pinged you all: my initial intention of asking a token is urgent (for tomorow), due to unexpected incident. Thus said, given the feedback above on quality, I think that I'm going to investigate for an alternative option for now. A token is still welcome, thus said. The service might improve in quality, and having a ready to go fallback option is always welcome.

The second point which encouraged me to notify all of you is that I would like your feedback on the quality of the account creation process. I don't think that having to read the wiki page documentation, ask a token in a talk page, wait for in-wiki reply, etc. is the best that can be achieved here.

Here is a sketch of what I would judge a decent user experience: going in the service itself, someone want to create a channel. He should be given two clearly distinct path "I want to create a room" and "I want to join an existing room". For the later, having the list of rooms and a form input as know is fine – a combobox might be an improvement. For the former, the first step should be an invitation to log in or register. For this last case, the user should be sent to a form page whose first step is "request an account creation", the user give a desired username, an email/SUL account nickname, possibly a why they need it. The form do what is required to make the account creation validated, notify the people who can create the account of the request, and send an email/Mediawiki-notification to the user to confirm its demand was well received. The form also load a page that tells the demand was well received and to check that the message of confirmation was received in their email/Mediawiki inbox. Once decision is made about allowing the account, the user is notified through the same communication channel(s).

Thus said, I'm not aware of all the issue related to the process of course. Let me know your mind on this UX point. --Psychoslave (talk) 08:42, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

@Psychoslave Hello, I'm sorry but I suggest not doing this with Wikimedia Meet, it's currently facing issues phab:T268393 Amir (talk) 12:06, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

@Psychoslave I think I fixed the issue by fully de-dockerizing the instance, it's fully open for now, test it and let me know if it works. Amir (talk) 05:41, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, @Ladsgroup for this, I will give feedback when I have an occasion to use it.

Thanks to @Fuzheado who provided me the token: although the account creation form landed me to an "internal error" page, it seems like it actually worked. Psychoslave (talk) 08:24, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikimedia Meet down?

https://meet.wmcloud.org/ seems to be down since last week?

I see the following errors:

Connection error
Your device may be offline or our servers may be experiencing problems.

404 Not Found
You can create a new conversation here

Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) 11:46, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Task filed at phab:T285112. Quiddity (talk) 21:39, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

License of Google Slides

Hi User:Fuzheado :D If I understand correctly you are the author of the nice slides linked from Wikimedia Meet#Performance. First question: is the license written somewhere? Sorry I cannot find it. I ask this because, then, someone could upload that presentation on Wikimedia Commons (mainly to avoid external links to Google Slides from this wiki). Thank you :) And... uh.. apologize in advance if I pinged the wrong author... --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 08:36, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, I've updated it to note it is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 so go ahead and feel free to use. - Fuzheado (talk) 02:24, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Service Down... discussion page?

I'm quite sure that there is a discussion page somewhere that explains why we decided to switch off Wikimedia Meet. I just cannot find this now. Thanks for sharing if you know (no need to tell that link to me, you can just put that link in the first section of Wikimedia Meet and/or somehow visible). Thanks :) ValerioBozz (talk) 07:55, 19 January 2024 (UTC)