Hey Pine,

The annual plan mentions Discovery will "explore improving Commons media search through structured data in partnership with WMDE". There's little more detail that can be offered than that right now; Wikimedia Germany is making good progress on structured data for Commons, but the project is still in its very early stages. It's difficult for Discovery to make efforts to improve search on Commons without this crucial point, and if we did, then such efforts would likely be wasted. When we're further along with getting structured data on Commons, we can start planning how to improve search; to do so any earlier would be pure guesswork, so I'd prefer we avoided that.

Hopefully that answers your questions. If not, let me know.

Thanks,

Dan

On 5 September 2016 at 13:50, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Discovery,

I'm wondering if there are any significant improvements coming in the next +/- 18 months for multimedia search on Commons. Finding images can be a very time-consuming job for Wikimedians and other users of the site.

For example, it would be nice to be able to do a "join" search with categories, so that only media files that appear in 2+ selected categories are shown in search results.

As an example, suppose that I want an image of a blue tile roof in China. The search "blue tile roof China" doesn't show any results that interest me on the first page. However, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wuhan_University_-_roof_tiles.JPG is an image that would interest me. That file is several layers deep in subcategories under the China category. It would be nice to be able to find that image by searching a join of the China category and its subcategories, with the "blue roof" category.

Thanks,

Pine

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Dan Garry

Lead Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation