On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In the meantime, it might be an idea for folks to
avoid claiming that
any issue that pops up on Commons can be solved in Wikidata, unless
they can produce a working case study rather than discussion about
proposals.
One of the Commons parts that could benefit most from Wikidata are the
content pages, aka Galleries. Right now they are volunteer-maintained and
they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
But it doesn't need to be so, these pages could be automated, so the page
is composed by querying images and sorting them automatically. Of course
volunteer intervention would be also needed to define the queries, but it
would be more sustainable than now (i.e. the page would be automatically
updated with new images if they meet the query criteria).
To achieve this it would be necessary to re-think Galleries, and consider
other paradigms, like that used by IMSLP.
Check for instance:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Tristan_und_Isolde,_WWV_90_(Wagner,_Richard)
That is a page for the work, and the different expressions/files are
structured in one page. This structure however is volunteer-maintained, but
it is to consider each file as a metadata container, and the section as the
result of a query. This approach is not followed in Commons, that is more
"category-oriented".
Going back to the original "Sagrada Familia" gallery example:
- the header data can be extracted from Wikidata with a Lua template. That
can be done now, no need to wait, just needs a Lua template and connect
with Wikidata via sitelink.
- each section would be a query for instance "depicts:sagrada familia AND
depicts:exterior".
- each file would be needed to be tagged accordingly with structured data,
and it would show up in the gallery page.
Galleries, thus, would become the hub where all media related to a subject
could be accessed. That, of course, would be too many images, considering
that just the "Towers of Sagrada familia" category has 159 images:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Towers_of_the_Sagrada_Fam%C3%AD…
That means that it would be needed to limit query results and define
criteria to decide which images to show, and let the user expand the full
query when wished.
Or another page (gallery) could be created for the "Towers of Sagrada
familia", which in turn could contain more queries for further details
about the the towers "depicts:sagrada familia AND depicts:exterior AND
depicts:right tower AND NOT depicts:left tower".
Categories would be rendered superfluous, with the focus shifted towards
maintaining queries and the proper description of image files with
structured data.
Anyhow, these are just some ideas to show that there are different ways of
working with media that might be more effective in the long run.
Cheers,
Micru