This post is onwiki at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Moving_toward_Speci…
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=== Background ===
Special:MediaSearch [1]–in addition to using Commons categories and
wikitext from templates–uses structured data on Commons and information
from Wikidata to find the most relevant and extensive results. This is a
new back-end approach to search for Commons, combined with a new interface
that makes the media results larger and the prominent focus of the page,
accessing some file information like licensing and description information
directly on the page as well as various ways to filter results.
Special:MediaSearch also natively supports all languages supported by
MediaWiki, and will utilize Wikidata’s concept-linking abilities and
multilingual labels to find relevant results regardless of the language of
the search term.
Special:Search [2], as a tool designed and built for the text-heavy side of
the projects, has always struggled to properly find and display media from
Commons without some of the more advanced features like Category search.
Special:Search also functions at its best in English, and is not
necessarily friendly to other languages.
One of the last remaining goals of the Structured Data on Commons project
is building and deploying a new search on Commons, a search created
specifically for Commons (ref: Structured Data on Commons grant
application, page 6, "Make searching for media files much more effective"
[3]). Special:MediaSearch has been in development for the past year to
complete this goal, keeping Special:Search available for users for cases
when its purposeful wikitext-based search may be more appropriate to use.
Release timeline and feedback along the way
=== Release timeline and feedback along the way ===
After completing bug fixes, updates, new features, and design changes based
on community feedback over the past year, the Structured Data team is ready
to begin the process of making Special:MediaSearch the default landing page
for the search bar. This also means that the “files depicting…” feature
will be removed, since MediaSearch uses depicts as a search input. A/B
testing and user experience testing has demonstrated a superior search
experience for all users of Commons, and survey feedback indicated a need
by some users to keep Special:Search available for their preference.. The
development team will honor the desire from the community to still be able
to get to Special:Search–there will be a link to access the page through
Special:MediaSearch, and there will be a preference to make Special:Search
the default landing page if someone would like to keep using it as their
primary source.
The team will release the default setting in stages, starting with
anonymous/not-logged-in users first at the end of March and then moving to
logged-in users at the end of April. The time between each release phase
will be approximately four weeks, and during this time I'll post about the
release and provide an opportunity for the community to leave feedback or
notice of crucial bugs or breaks in the feature that may need to be
addressed before the deployment continues. The team is still receptive to
community input, to make sure any small pain points in MediaSearch are
addressed before the default setting is released to all users [4]. It is
important to the team that the release goes as smoothly as possible for the
community, and they're here to listen and respond in case of problems.
Thanks for your time, I'll be sure to post updates as needed as we get
closer to the default setting change.
1.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch
2.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search
3.
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Public_Copy_-_Struc…
4.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data/Media_search
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Keegan Peterzell (he/him)
Technical Collaboration Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation