Hi Brian,
I've been working on an api module/extension to extract metadata from
commons image description pages, and display it in the API.
Awesome!
The downside to this is in order to effectively get metadata out of commons given the current practises, one essentially has to screen scrape and do slightly ugly things
This [1] looks quite acrobatic indeed. Can’t we make better use of the machine-readable markings provided by templates? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Machine-readable_data
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/80403/4/CommonsMetadata_body.php