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 update on where we are:
* We're making progress globally! https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/historical_tallies.svg Thank you all for your help; it's much appreciated :)
* On Commons, we're going to run incremental bot runs to add {{information}} to files that don't have it, starting with the simplest cases. If you have a bot or would like to get involved, join us at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Adding_the_Inf...
* Soon we'll be able to use CSS classes for information fields, in addition to IDs. This will make it easier to add the markers to templates with existing IDs, and those not using tables. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T75332
Don't forget that you can ask your questions at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:File_metadata_cleanup_drive if you need help fixing templates and files on your wiki.
Thank you!
On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org wrote:
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].
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...
[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...
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