Hello everyone,
Following up on the WISE https://wise.wmcloud.org/ tool's announcement, we wanted to briefly explain why we are seeking community interest and support.
At the moment, WISE indexes only “Media of the Day” (~5,000 videos). Expanding this to cover the full Wikimedia Commons collection (millions of images) requires significant computational resources, especially large-scale GPU processing, along with storage and ongoing maintenance.
Before moving in that direction, we want to understand:
- Is this tool useful for the community? - Should we invest effort and resources to scale it further? - Are there any concerns we should address first?
If you find WISE useful or promising, you can support or share feedback here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wise#Community_interest_and_suppo...
You can:
- Add your support or comments on the page - Share use cases or ideas - Raise any concerns or suggestions
Your input will help guide whether and how we expand WISE further. Thanks again for your time and feedback.
Wise Tool: https://wise.wmcloud.org/
Regards, Gopa Vasanth
On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 2:09 AM Vasanth Gopa gopavasanth1999@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone,
We would love to get your feedback on a tool we have been working on: https://wise.wmcloud.org/
This is a search tool for images and videos on wikimedia. Currently is searching only on media of the day (approximately 5000 videos). It searches only the visual content of the file (not on metadata, filename, or structured data). It also does face detection and recognition.
Please give it a go. Here's some examples:
*Semantic example queries:* "man at a train station" "एक व्यक्ति रेलवे स्टेशन पर" (Hindi) "horse in an airplane" "విమానంలో గుర్రం" (Telugu) "man with a flower" "pirate with a pistol"
*Face search (select "Faces"):*
Click the green "Image" button and paste an image URL
Example inputs:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Neil_Armstrong_pose.jpg
[warning: some videos are ogv videos and your brownser may not play them, so watch them on Commons, i.e., after clicking the search result, scroll down to the media metadata table, and follow the link to commons]
*Key features include:*
- Semantic search using natural language to find relevant images on
Commons from the visual content only (not the structured data or description, only the image itself)
- Face search: upload or paste a face image, and the tool will try to
identify and locate that person across images and videos, including timestamps where they appear
- Audio search: search within audio files to find relevant segments
- Multilingual search: supports queries in multiple languages
We are actively improving the tool and would really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or ideas from the community. Here's some more immediate future plans:
- Search on all wikimedia images (instead of only videos / media of the
day)
- Show similar images when uploading an image to suggest filenames,
categories, and other relevant metadata
More technical details and a place to share feedback at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wise
- Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T424092
- Announcement on Village pump:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Introducing_WISE%3A_... Regards,
Gopa Vasanth https://gopavasanth.github.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/gopavasanth1999 | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopa-vasanth/ | GitHub https://github.com/gopavasanth | Gerrit https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/gopavasanth
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”