Hoi,

Carly thank you for your reply.

The impression that I get is that the relevance of "language-agnostic" is considered secondary. However over fifty percent of the Wikimedia traffic is not English. Improving search for categories and all these other wonderful English constructs that make up Commons serves less than fifty percent of our traffic.

What I miss in everything that I read is when Special:MediaSearch is considered "good enough" to truly expose it to the bigger fifty percent or all the other languages. The challenge is not technical, it is engagement. How do we get all the missing labels in Wikidata without the engagement of our public.. Just try finding images in our smallest languages. Google is not your friend, what you find is a tiny subset of what you get offered in English. Now consider ONE teacher that adds the label for "turkey" in Wikidata and links the Qid to ten pictures of a turkey... As a result I will find ten more "kalkoen" in my language. Now consider TEN teachers all teaching the same curriculum all adding labels for 5 labels in their languages and adding 50 Qid to pictures in a week for their students.. It enables Commons search in any language, just add "your" label for that item.

Remember that wiki means quick. What we have in Special:MediaSearch is good enough. It will grow from where we are and it will do really well once it expands its public. By opening up the biggest freely licensed resource in any language we will engage a public that uses our media, will expand our media and will open up 1 community in the languages that expands its label coverage in Wikidata. I can even imagine that the expanded availability of material will stimulate writing in Wikipedia and adding pictures of local dignitaries.. We do not have pictures for all the country level ministers of Africa for the twenty first let alone the twentieth century..

We have something to give in Commons but we have more to gain when we open up.

Thanks,

GerardM

On Tue, 2 Feb 2021 at 17:26, Carly Bogen <cbogen@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi GerardM,

Thank you for your question. Special:MediaSearch is still in active development by the Structured Data team at WMF. It’s great to hear about your excitement around the tool. You can follow along on the MediaSearch project page [1]. We will be posting more updates to that page in the near future.

For those who aren’t familiar with the project, Special:MediaSearch is an image-focused user interface for searching Wikimedia Commons that includes:
An image-focused user interface that makes it easier to find what you're looking for and discover new things.
An improved set of search results that utilizes structured data and is more language-agnostic.
An autocomplete for search terms that leverages Wikidata's vast repository of labels & aliases.
We welcome your feedback on the discussion page [2].

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Media_search
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data/Media_search

Thanks very much,

Carly Bogen (she/her)
Sr. Program Manager, Structured Data
Wikimedia Foundation

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 12:38 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I cannot make it. There is only one thing I want to know. What is the status of Special:MediaSearch? Are you essentially done with this and consequently is this for the community to pick up.. are there plans to open up Commons for other languages than English by the WMF organisation?.
Thanks,
GerardM

On Mon, 1 Feb 2021 at 20:07, Trey Jones <tjones@wikimedia.org> wrote:

The Search Platform Team usually holds office hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.!

Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.

Details for our next meeting:

Date: Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021

Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET

Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours

Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww

Join by phone in the US: +1 786-701-6904 PIN: 262 122 849#

Hope to talk to you Wednesday!
—Trey

Trey Jones
Sr. Computational Linguist, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
UTC-5 / EST
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