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:
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.
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Fabrice Florin
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