Greetings,
As you may have seen in Tech News, on the Wikimedia blog or at the latest Metrics meeting, I'm currently leading a File metadata cleanup drive, whose goal is to to fix file pages and tweak templates across Wikimedia wikis, to ensure that multimedia files consistently contain machine-readable metadata [1,2].
This initiative is a critical step in improving reuse and following best practices for attribution in PDF prints, offline content like Kiwix and third party tools like WikiWand, among others.
Some of you have already started adding the markers to information and licensing templates (Thank you!) and I'm going around wikis to do the same. We're making progress [3], but there's still a lot of work to do because we have so many wikis.
I'd like to ask for your help in adding markers to the templates on your wiki, since you probably speak many languages that I have trouble deciphering. You're also more familiar with your wiki's templates, and a distributed effort will be more efficient than just a handful of us going around wikis :)
There's a detailed guide in many languages if you're not sure how to proceed: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/File_metadata_cleanup_dri...
I also recommend that you reach out to other editors on your wiki, template authors, gadget maintainers, etc. since they may be able to help, but may not know about this effort.
I'm also happy to help if you have questions. You can ask me off-list, on the tech ambassadors list, on IRC (I'm guillom in #wikimedia on freenode) or on my talk page on Meta. (Carrier pigeons are discouraged.)
If you're helping, please consider adding yourself to the list of participants, so others can see which wikis are actively fixing files and templates: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive/Participants
And if you're having difficulties, please do let others know on the talk page so we can try and find a solution, both for your benefit and for the benefit of others who might have the same problem: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:File_metadata_cleanup_drive .
I hope that you'll be able to help fix files and templates on your wiki and give a hand in this distributed effort.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive [2] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/11/07/cleaning-up-file-metadata-for-humans-a... [3] https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/historical_tallies.svg
Hi,
A quick follow-up: We now have good numbers for the amount of files missing machine-readable metadata on Commons (spoiler: it's about ~500,000 files, meaning ~98% of files have machine-readable markers). Below is a copy of the update I sent to commons-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2014-December/007431.html
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org Date: Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:16 PM Subject: File metadata cleanup drive: We now have numbers for Commons To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Greetings,
As many of you are aware, we're currently in the process of collectively adding machine-readable metadata to many files and templates that don't have them, both on Commons and on all other Wikimedia wikis with local uploads [1,2]. This makes it much easier to see and re-use multimedia files consistently with best practices for attribution across a variety of channels (offline, PDF exports, mobile platforms, MediaViewer, WikiWand, etc.)
In October, I created a dashboard to track how many files were missing the machine-readable markers on each wiki [3]. Unfortunately, due to the size of Commons, I needed to find another way to count them there.
Yesterday, I finished to implement the script for Commons, and started to run it. As of today, we have accurate numbers for the quantity of files missing machine-readable metadata on Commons: ~533,000, out of ~24 million [4]. It may seem like a lot, but I personally think it's a great testament to the dedication of the Commons community.
Now that we have numbers, we can work on going through those files and fixing them. Many of them are missing the {{information}} template, but many of those are also part of a batch: either they were uploaded by the same user, or they were mass-uploaded by a bot. In either case, this makes it easier to parse the information and add the {{information}} template automatically with a bot, thus avoiding painful manual work.
I invite you to take a look at the list of files at https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html and see if you can find such groups and patterns.
Once you identify a pattern, you're encouraged to add a section to the Bot Requests page on Commons, so that a bot owner can fix them: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Adding_the_Inf...
I believe we can make a lot of progress rapidly if we dive into the list of files and fix all the groups we can find. The list and statistics will be updated daily so it'll be easy to see our progress.
Let me know if you'd like to help but are unsure how!
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive [2] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/11/07/cleaning-up-file-metadata-for-humans-a... [3] https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/ [4] https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org