Commons talk:WMF support for Commons/Commons community calls

Priorities from the perspective of a frequent user and re-user (inside and outside Wikimedia projects)

Posting here just in the case I will miss tomorrow's call. I am very grateful for this opportunity, thank you for listening and considering <3 !

My perspective: I very frequently edit Wikimedia Commons, with the focus of describing the media there as accurately and reliably as possible, and making the media there usable and re-usable by the world (not just Wikimedia projects), in full agreement with the Wikimedia movement strategy.

Professionally I also currently lead a project by a government agency which frequently re-uses media from Wikimedia Commons (probably often media which is not used in Wikipedia at all). You can see some of the usage here. Besides this visible re-use, we also rely on search and querying of Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata to find more media and data, which is harder to track down. As project manager I can say our usage and data retrieval goes up to 10,000s to 100,000s of Wikidata items and Commons files.

I have worked on media databases (broadly speaking) professionally since the early 2000s. My native language is Dutch and I am very aware that the majority of the world doesn't speak a word of English. We have the tools in Wikimedia projects to serve this majority of the world if we decide to leverage them.

High-level wishes from these perspectives:

• In terms of content organization, multilingual discoverability and ease of re-use, structured data is vastly superior. A part of the Wikimedia Commons community is very attached to Wikitext and categories, and I heard that they matter for discoverability too; therefore I still use them. Mainly as duplicate work on top of adding structured data - I would be able to use my sparse volunteer time more efficiently if this were not needed. For re-using and searching, structured data is the way to go. Commons should be a structured database just like any other contemporary digital assets management system.
• Commons is a knowledge platform, not a stock images website. If I want to find a free picture of a dog or a rainbow, I will use a generic search engine. The unique strength of Wikimedia Commons is that we describe and contextualize very specific things (a specific church at a certain point in time, a specific occurrence of an animal or plant in a specific location...). Generic search engines can't help searching for such specific things at specific times and spaces, but we can build (and partly already have) the unique and very helpful infrastructure to achieve that. We should further develop search and browsing for discovery of such specificity. For discovery of media related to general topics, IMO it's better to e.g. work with general-purpose search engines, perhaps focusing on mission-aligned ones (e.g. DuckDuckGo?), to make our general-scope media more generally discoverable there.
• Generally make structured data more visible to contributors so that there is more incentive to improve it.
• Design updates to SDC should encourage editors to edit with precision and accuracy (sourced, correct, not generic but specific).

More specific wishes and requests I'm currently thinking of:

• Remove authentification from WCQS so that Wikimedians, and cultural and other knowledge organizations around the world can perform federated and shareable Wikimedia Commons queries.
• Improve MediaSearch so that it shows (structured) metadata of each file by default (not needing a click).
• Add faceted search to MediaSearch.
• Persistent faceted search results can become new-style galleries. It would be great to be able to have persistent URIs for specific faceted search results, multilingually ("Korenmolen de Distilleerketel in de 19de eeuw")
• Show structured data on file pages by default and more prominent than Wikitext (not in a separate tab anymore)
• In order to be able to re-use gadgets and scripts from Wikidata, and to provide a unified experience, make sure SDC has the generic Wikibase/Wikidata design (i.e. revert the decision to have Commons-specific UI for SDC).

Thanks! Spinster (talk) 09:39, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

As someone who works on Wikidata scripts/gadgets a lot, the biggest problem for those (by far) is the lack of Javascript hooks. I can adapt scripts to support different HTML structures, but they won't work if they don't run at the right time.

Also, links to some relevant tickets:

• phab:T327076 - UI for structured data on Commons should have the same Javascript hooks as Wikidata
• phab:T341781 - Show structured data by default
• phab:T297995 - Remove authentication from Wikimedia Commons Query Services (WCQS)
• phab:T337106 - Faceted, structured data-based MediaSearch on Wikimedia Commons

- Nikki (talk) 16:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

In terms of content organization, multilingual discoverability and ease of re-use, structured data is vastly superior. Strongly disagree. It's basically redundant to categories and just duplicates the work. Most files do not have structured data and those that have them do not have most major subjects or as many things set as the categories. Most of the SD that are set have been set using the categories. It's wishful thinking and is SD is a resource-sink without much need for it when it comes to subjects depicted. Moreover, categories can also be multilingual – it's just one of many cases where people think SD is needed or better when it's not. See Add machine translated category titles on WMC.

Improve MediaSearch so that it shows (structured) metadata of each file by default Also strongly oppose – instead make it show the categories which unlike SD are well-maintained, usually fairly complete and not polluted with unrelated or vandal depicts data.

make structured data more visible to contributors so that there is more incentive to improve it just wastes precious scarce volunteer time to duplicate work that has already been done via file categories.

For discovery of media related to general topics, IMO it's better to e.g. work with general-purpose search engines, perhaps focusing on mission-aligned ones (e.g. DuckDuckGo?), to make our general-scope media more generally discoverable there. People also search for relatively niche things with Web search engines (e.g. a specific river from space at sunlight) and the problem is that WMC is not well indexed there. Videos are not showing in DuckDuckGo Videos at all for example. See Do something about Google & DuckDuckGo search not indexing media files and categories on Commons.

Please accept the reality of structure data and categories. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:22, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Perennial needs

Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey. RoyZuo (talk) 11:34, 20 November 2024 (UTC)