Greetings,

After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons[1] project, I wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening.

The meeting in Berlin[2] in October provided the engineering teams with a lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can be allocated to it.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The full project is described at Mediawiki.org[3].This will benefit the structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for Commons is a desired goal of this project.

The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature. Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on Commons at Category:Vincent van Gogh or Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons.

To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are tracked in Phabricator[4].

Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings. This is done as part of the Wikidata WikiProject "Sum of All Paintings"[5]. This helps us to learn how to refine metadata structure about artworks. Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too.

Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results[6]. The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on Commons. You can help by looking for files[7] with similarly-formatted description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests[8] so that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them.

At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples[9][10]. These examples can give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to display on-wiki in the future.

The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns.

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Berlin_bootcamp 3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing 4. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594 5. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings 6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive 7. https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html 8. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests 9. http://www.zone47.com/crotos/?p=1&p276=190804&y1=1600&y2=2014 10. http://sum.bykr.org/432253