This post is onwiki at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Moving_toward_Specia...
------- === Background ===
Special:MediaSearch [1]–in addition to using Commons categories and wikitext from templates–uses structured data on Commons and information from Wikidata to find the most relevant and extensive results. This is a new back-end approach to search for Commons, combined with a new interface that makes the media results larger and the prominent focus of the page, accessing some file information like licensing and description information directly on the page as well as various ways to filter results. Special:MediaSearch also natively supports all languages supported by MediaWiki, and will utilize Wikidata’s concept-linking abilities and multilingual labels to find relevant results regardless of the language of the search term.
Special:Search [2], as a tool designed and built for the text-heavy side of the projects, has always struggled to properly find and display media from Commons without some of the more advanced features like Category search. Special:Search also functions at its best in English, and is not necessarily friendly to other languages.
One of the last remaining goals of the Structured Data on Commons project is building and deploying a new search on Commons, a search created specifically for Commons (ref: Structured Data on Commons grant application, page 6, "Make searching for media files much more effective" [3]). Special:MediaSearch has been in development for the past year to complete this goal, keeping Special:Search available for users for cases when its purposeful wikitext-based search may be more appropriate to use. Release timeline and feedback along the way
=== Release timeline and feedback along the way ===
After completing bug fixes, updates, new features, and design changes based on community feedback over the past year, the Structured Data team is ready to begin the process of making Special:MediaSearch the default landing page for the search bar. This also means that the “files depicting…” feature will be removed, since MediaSearch uses depicts as a search input. A/B testing and user experience testing has demonstrated a superior search experience for all users of Commons, and survey feedback indicated a need by some users to keep Special:Search available for their preference.. The development team will honor the desire from the community to still be able to get to Special:Search–there will be a link to access the page through Special:MediaSearch, and there will be a preference to make Special:Search the default landing page if someone would like to keep using it as their primary source.
The team will release the default setting in stages, starting with anonymous/not-logged-in users first at the end of March and then moving to logged-in users at the end of April. The time between each release phase will be approximately four weeks, and during this time I'll post about the release and provide an opportunity for the community to leave feedback or notice of crucial bugs or breaks in the feature that may need to be addressed before the deployment continues. The team is still receptive to community input, to make sure any small pain points in MediaSearch are addressed before the default setting is released to all users [4]. It is important to the team that the release goes as smoothly as possible for the community, and they're here to listen and respond in case of problems.
Thanks for your time, I'll be sure to post updates as needed as we get closer to the default setting change.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search 3. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Public_Copy_-_Struct... 4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data/Media_search
Keegan Peterzell via Commons-l, 23/02/21 22:36:
Special:Search also functions at its best in English, and is not necessarily friendly to other languages.
This is not true. I think you meant to say that the text in Commons is mostly English, while the new structured search is expected to be able to leverage more multilingual content.
What's the rationale for changing the search bar autocompletion from the title prefixes to the structured search? The non-prefix search has caused much trouble in Wikidata for years. What kind of use cases were considered for this part of the matter? (I know you can disable that in the preferences.)
Federico
Hoi, I totally agree with Frederico. The search functionality for other languages is not seen as strategic at this time. This is because the flaws are seen from "our" perspective and the benefits for "our" readers are not understood. When we promote the use of the multilingual search capabilities of Commons, a meaningful reference is the support Google provides in finding pictures for a language. The results are not great. It follows that the benefits are not based on what you/we experience but on what our readers experience.
When we promote the use of Commons for other languages, a teacher may add labels in THEIR language to the search item that is important in the curriculum for the students. When one teacher adds them for his class, all other classes and schools using the same curriculum will benefit. When someone adds the "depicts" statement to a picture, it can be found in every language that has a label for any picture with that "depicts" statement.
Such an approach is a Wiki approach ... please consider this approach. Thanks, GerardM
On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 07:56, Federico Leva (Nemo) via Commons-l < commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Keegan Peterzell via Commons-l, 23/02/21 22:36:
Special:Search also functions at its best in English, and is not necessarily friendly to other languages.
This is not true. I think you meant to say that the text in Commons is mostly English, while the new structured search is expected to be able to leverage more multilingual content.
What's the rationale for changing the search bar autocompletion from the title prefixes to the structured search? The non-prefix search has caused much trouble in Wikidata for years. What kind of use cases were considered for this part of the matter? (I know you can disable that in the preferences.)
Federico
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 24 Feb 2021, at 06:55, Federico Leva (Nemo) via Commons-l commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Keegan Peterzell via Commons-l, 23/02/21 22:36:
Special:Search also functions at its best in English, and is not necessarily friendly to other languages.
This is not true. I think you meant to say that the text in Commons is mostly English, while the new structured search is expected to be able to leverage more multilingual content.
It’s also worth noting that the Wikidata Infobox includes some search engine optimisation for other languages - i.e., it embeds Wikidata labels from different languages in the category contents, so Special:Search can pick up on them and return the relevant category links. That doesn’t help with media files, though, where the new search looks like a great step forward for multilingual support.
Thanks, Mike
Hi Nemo,
On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 12:55 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
What's the rationale for changing the search bar autocompletion from the title prefixes to the structured search? The non-prefix search has caused much trouble in Wikidata for years. What kind of use cases were considered for this part of the matter? (I know you can disable that in the preferences.)
I'm not familiar with Wikidata's experience, can you tell me more about what you mean or point me to where I can learn more? It'll help me find out what you're looking for as far as our reasons go, after that I'll check with our interim product manager (who was not responsible for making the decision that you're referring to, so there's no direct person for me to ask about this).