Greetings!
We invite you to join a discussion about Structured Data on Commons, to help us plan our
next steps for this project.
The Structured Data initiative proposes to store and retrieve information for media files
in machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons, using Wikidata tools and practices, as
described on our new project page (1).
The purpose of this project is to make it easier for users to read and write file
information, and to enable developers to build better tools to view, search, edit, curate
and use media files. To that end, we propose to investigate this opportunity together
through community discussions and small experiments. If these initial tests are
successful, we would develop new tools and practices for structured data, then work with
our communities to gradually migrate unstructured data into a machine-readable format over
time.
The Multimedia team and the Wikidata team are starting to plan this project together, in
collaboration with many community volunteers active on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis.
We had a truly inspiring roundtable discussion about Structured Data at Wikimania a few
weeks ago, to define a first proposal together (2).
We would now like to extend this discussion to include more community members that might
benefit from this initiative. Please take a moment to read the project overview on
Commons, then let us know what you think, by answering some of the questions on its talk
page (3).
We also invite you to join a Structured Data Q&A on Wednesday September 3 at 19:00
UTC, so we can discuss some of the details live in this IRC office hours chat. Please RSVP
if you plan to attend (4).
Lastly, we propose to form small workgroups to investigate workflows, data structure,
research, platform, features, migration and other open issues. If you are interested in
contributing to one of these workgroups, we invite you to sign up on directly on our hub
page (5) -- and help start a sub-page for your workgroup.
We look forward to some productive discussions with you in coming weeks. In previous
roundtables, many of you told us this is the most important contribution that our team can
make to support multimedia in coming years. We heard you loud and clear and are happy to
devote more resources to bring it to life, with your help.
We are honored to be working with the Wikidata team and talented community members like
you to take on this challenge, improve our infrastructure and provide a better experience
for all our users.
Onward!
Fabrice — for the Structured Data team
(1) Structured Data Hub on Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
(2) Structured Data Slides:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Structured_Data_-_Slides.pdf
(3) Structured Data Talk Page:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Structured_data
(4) Structured Data Q&A (IRC chat on Sep. 3):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data#Discussions
(5) Structured Data Workgroups:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data#Workgroups
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)