We invite you to join a discussion about Structured Data on Commons, to help us plan our next steps for this project.

The Structured Data initiative proposes to store and retrieve information for media files in machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons, using Wikidata tools and practices, as described on our new project page (1).

The purpose of this project is to make it easier for users to read and write file information, and to enable developers to build better tools to view, search, edit, curate and use media files. To that end, we propose to investigate this opportunity together through community discussions and small experiments. If these initial tests are successful, we would develop new tools and practices for structured data, then work with our communities to gradually migrate unstructured data into a machine-readable format over time.

The Multimedia team and the Wikidata team are starting to plan this project together, in collaboration with many community volunteers active on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. We had a truly inspiring roundtable discussion about Structured Data at Wikimania a few weeks ago, to define a first proposal together (2).

We would now like to extend this discussion to include more community members that might benefit from this initiative. Please take a moment to read the project overview on Commons, then let us know what you think, by answering some of the questions on its talk page (3).

We also invite you to join a Structured Data Q&A on Wednesday September 3 at 19:00 UTC, so we can discuss some of the details live in this IRC office hours chat. Please RSVP if you plan to attend (4).

Lastly, we propose to form small workgroups to investigate workflows, data structure, research, platform, features, migration and other open issues. If you are interested in contributing to one of these workgroups, we invite you to sign up on directly on our hub page (5) -- and help start a sub-page for your workgroup.

We look forward to some productive discussions with you in coming weeks. In previous roundtables, many of you told us this is the most important contribution that our team can make to support multimedia in coming years. We heard you loud and clear and are happy to devote more resources to bring it to life, with your help.

We are honored to be working with the Wikidata team and talented community members like you to take on this challenge, improve our infrastructure and provide a better experience for all our users.

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin

Product Manager, Multimedia

Wikimedia Foundation

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)