Thanks, Gerard, we really appreciate your good suggestion -- and kudos to all that made these new multilingual search developments possible!

Providing better search for multimedia files is one of our multimedia team's top priorities for 2014, and we expect to work closely with the community, Wikidata and WMF's platform team to add structured data to Commons and implement more discovery methods to our workflows.

We plan to host special discussions to address these projects with you all in the new year, so we can coordinate our next steps together. 

This month's roundtables and meetups are focused on shorter-term priorities, but rest assured that better search and structured data are key to our overall multimedia plan. We expect that this initiative will be a long-term project and hope to start actual development in mid-2014, as outlined in this planning page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goals#Milestones

We now aim to discuss this multi-facetted and complex project with community members and the Wikidata team to finalize concrete plans in the first half of 2014, and to start major development in summer 2014, as soon as the Wikidata team is ready to work with us on this critical objective.

Thanks again -- and to be continued. :)

All the best,


Fabrice


On Dec 5, 2013, at 2:00 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi Fabrice,

The objective of Commons is that it is used. To do that the media files of Commons have to be found. The Tamil, the Polish and the Italian Wikipedia support additional search functionality that allows its readers to find images using their own language. It makes use of technology based on Wikidata.

There are some teething problems but this is probably the most exciting news that impacts for everyone who is not fluent in English.

It would be exceedingly cool when this is taken in consideration when you consider all the super duper extra cool gadget galore that will also make Commons more relevant, useful and its content discoverable.
Thanks,
       GerardM

PS they started support Commons in their own langauge only this week.


On 5 December 2013 00:11, Fabrice Florin <fflorin@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Greetings!

Can you help us create a better multimedia experience on Wikipedia and its sister sites? 

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, we'd like to invite you to join a special Multimedia Meetup at the Wikimedia Foundation, this Monday, December 9 at 6:30pm PST. 

This one-hour event will bring together dozens of developers and community members to discuss how we can use images, sounds and videos to help people learn more effectively on our sites.

To join us, simply sign up here:
http://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/events/123456892/

We will start our meeting by presenting a vision for multimedia in 2016 and ask you how we can improve it. 

We will then demo and discuss these new projects together:
* media viewer 
* file feedback
* new video formats
* campaign tools

As a group, we will brainstorm new ways to view, contribute, curate, discover and use media files on Wikipedia, and grow our audio-visual knowledge base in the process.

This is a great opportunity to meet our developers and network with other like-minded community members. And we'll be serving free drinks and pizza to make this even more fun for you. :)

Images, sounds and videos can engage users more deeply than text articles, and better support their individual learning styles. To that end, we aim to engage more users to collaborate through multimedia -- by improving their viewing experience, increasing their media contributions, and making it easier to use media in articles.

We look forward to your thoughts on how to make this vision happen together.

Thanks for your consideration. We hope to speak with you soon, so we can plan our next steps with your help. :)

All the best,



Fabrice

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia

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Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation