The Structured Data on Commons team has begun beta testing of the first feature, multilingual file captions, and all community members are invited to test it out. Captions is based on designs discussed with the community [1][2] and the team is looking forward to hearing about testing.

***If all goes well during testing, captions will be turned on for Commons around the second week of January, 2019.***

Multilingual captions are plain text fields that provide brief, easily translatable details of a file in a way that is easy to create, edit, and curate. Captions are added during the upload process using the UploadWizard, or they can be added directly on any file page on Commons. Adding captions in multiple languages is a simple process that requires only a few steps.

The details:

• There is [[mw:Help:File_captions|a help page available on how to use multilingual file captions]]

• Testing will take place on Beta Commons. If you don’t yet have an account set up there, you’ll need one. (direct link: https://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page )

• Beta Commons is a testbed, and not configured exactly like the real Commons site, so expect to see some discrepancies with UI elements like search

• Structured Data introduces the potential for many important page changes to happen at once, which could flood the recent changes list. Because of this, Enhanced Recent Changes is enabled as it currently is at Commons, but with some user interface changes.

• Feedback and commentary on the file caption functionality are welcome and encouraged on the discussion page for this post: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data/Beta_captions_testing

• Some testing has already taken place and the team are aware of some issues. A list of known issues can be seen below

• If you discover a bug/issue that is not covered in the known issues, please file a ticket on Phabricator and tag it with the “Multimedia” tag. Use [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?projects=multimedia this link to file a new task] already tagged with "Multimedia."

Known issues:

• Search is not currently working on Beta Commons. Search is not needed for testing captions, but service should be restored soon.

• Language name display inconsistencies in multilingual file captions - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209380

• Language names for multilingual File captions can run into the caption value in the mobile view - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209333

• Deleting a caption field that has text that exceeds the limit does not re-enable the "publish" button - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209329

• "Edit" tab for past revisions should be "restore" - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209187

• When using the back button, recently added captions sometimes don't display in Chrome - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208894

• File Captions can't be edited on mobile browsers - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208993

• Wrong font weight for some language labels on SDC captions box - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208902