Greetings,
After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons[1] project, I
wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three
months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is
happening.
The meeting in Berlin[2] in October provided the engineering teams with a
lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was
put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual
Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can
be allocated to it.
The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve
the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a
production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The
full project is described at Mediawiki.org[3].This will benefit the
structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for
Commons is a desired goal of this project.
The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature.
Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the
current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the
statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on Commons at
Category:Vincent van Gogh or Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary
access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up
the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority
control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do
now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons.
To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs
to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the
local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help
with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are
tracked in Phabricator[4].
Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes
an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from
Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings.
This is done as part of the Wikidata WikiProject "Sum of All Paintings"[5].
This helps us to learn how to refine metadata structure about artworks.
Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too.
Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results[6].
The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or
the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has
reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on
Commons. You can help by looking for files[7] with similarly-formatted
description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests[8] so
that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them.
At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models
were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured
data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples[9][10]. These examples can
give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to
display on-wiki in the future.
The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and
staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support
in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things
to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in
the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns.
1.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
2.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Berlin_bootcamp
3.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing
4.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594
5.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings
6.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive
7.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html
8.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests
9.
http://www.zone47.com/crotos/?p=1&p276=190804&y1=1600&y2=2014
10.
http://sum.bykr.org/432253
--
Keegan Peterzell
Community Liaison, Product
Wikimedia Foundation