Hello all,
This is Giovanna, from the GLAM & Culture team at the Foundation. I'm here
to share some really exciting news with you: the launch of the new Media
Search and the Image Suggestion API.
*Making cultural content more visible*
Several product teams at the Foundation are working hard to improve image
discovery and reuse on Wikimedia projects. Two new releases show the
potential of these developments for libraries and cultural institutions.
The first is the new Media Search on Wikimedia Commons, by the Structured
Data Across Wikimedia team, and the second is a proof-of-concept
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Structured_data_across_Wikimedia> Image
Suggestion API, by the Platform Engineering team.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Platform_Engineering_Team>
*Searching across languages*
Media Search (or Special:MediaSearch
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch?type=image>) is an
image-focused interface that makes it easier to find what you’re looking
for on Wikimedia Commons. Most importantly, the search results are language
agnostic. Given a search term like "zonnevlek" (Dutch for “sunspot”), Media
Search won’t just return the one file on Commons that uses that term, it
will search Wikidata for relevant entities and then find all files with
that term and any of its aliases or translations. For the “zonnevlek”
example, the number of images returned increased from one file to more than
six hundred files. Media Search will make the millions of images
contributed by libraries and cultural institutions much more accessible to
a broad global audience.
You can try the new search here
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch>. It became the
default search landing page for anonymous users on 1 April 2021, and for
all users in May 2021.
To increase the search relevance of your files, you should include a
descriptive title and detailed description, use the relevant Commons
categories, and add depicts statements and a caption as Structured Data
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Media_search>.
Suggesting images for Wikipedia
The Image Suggestion API <https://image-suggestion-api.toolforge.org/?doc#/>
is a service that will generate a list of unillustrated articles for any
language version of Wikipedia, and then suggest up to 10 images for
placement on those articles. The API will be powering a planned ‘add an
image’ structured task for newcomers
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Structured_tasks/Add_an_image>
to Wikipedia but could also be used to drive image reuse campaigns,
such as Wikipedia
Pages Wanting Photos
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos>.
Right now, the API is only a proof of concept and is still being developed.
You can try it at API Documentation
<https://image-suggestion-api.toolforge.org/?doc#/> and learn more on
the MediaWiki
page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Core_Platform_Team/Initiatives/Image_Suggestion_API>.
If you can imagine using this API in your work with images, share your
ideas on the Talk page.
The API uses algorithms that simply aggregate existing information from
Wikidata and Commons, drawing on connections already made by experienced
contributors. There are four main ways that it suggests matches to
unillustrated articles:
1.
Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has an image (P18
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P18>), choose that image.
2.
Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has a Commons category
associated (P373 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P373>), choose
an image from the category.
3.
Look at the articles about the same topic in other language Wikipedias.
Choose a lead image from those articles.
4.
Search MediaSearch for the title of the article. If an image ranks high
enough in the results, choose that image.
To make your files available to the Image Suggestion API, you should use
the relevant Commons categories and add depicts statements as Structured
Data
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Media_search>.
Learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data on Commons by reviewing
the updated documentation
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/GLAM/Why> and
joining our April office hours
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_GLAM_team/Office_Hours>
on Monday, 26 April, 3.30-4.30pm UTC, and on Tuesday, 27 April, 11.00-12.00
UTC.
This was also published in the WMF *This month in GLAM *newsletter. You can
read the rest of it here
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/March_2021/Contents/WMF_GLAM_report>
.
Hope to see you all during the April office hours.
Best,
Giovanna Fontenelle (she/her)
Program Officer; GLAM and Culture
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>