On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:10 AM Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hay Kranen created a proof of concept where Commons is
searched for
pictures that (per standard) use a "depicts" statement.
This is a beautiful proof of concept; thank you for sharing it,
Gerard, and thank you, Hay, for developing it. It really illustrates
the power and importance of the Structured Data efforts.
To pick a different example, imagine that you want to illustrate an
article about the importance of wheelchair accessibility at your
university. You might try a major search engine like Google Images.
Try replacing the word "wheelchair" with translations in other
languages. Note how the result sets are different, and how you may get
a much smaller set of results in languages with a smaller Internet
presence.
https://www.google.com/search?q=wheelchair&tbm=isch (English)
https://www.google.com/search?q=kitimaguru&tbm=isch (Swahili, far less
relevant and smaller set)
In contrast, the use of Wikidata items means that, as long as a label
exists for a given language, you can search in _any_ language and get
the same images:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/sdsearch/#q=haswbstatement:P180=Q191931
The fact that the UI of this tool is currently English is an
implementation detail; even with Hay's implementation, you can type in
"kitimaguru" and get the same results as in English.
It would be wonderful to see this functionality developed further, and
to ultimately make this kind of search functionality central to the
user experience for Wikimedia Commons, so that speakers of any
language are given _meaningful_ access to freely reusable media.
Warmly,
Erik