Hi,
A quick follow-up: We now have good numbers for the amount of files
missing machine-readable metadata on Commons (spoiler: it's about
~500,000 files, meaning ~98% of files have machine-readable markers).
Below is a copy of the update I sent to commons-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2014-December/007431.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:16 PM
Subject: File metadata cleanup drive: We now have numbers for Commons
To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects
<wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, Wikimedia Commons
Discussion List <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Greetings,
As many of you are aware, we're currently in the process of
collectively adding machine-readable metadata to many files and
templates that don't have them, both on Commons and on all other
Wikimedia wikis with local uploads [1,2]. This makes it much easier to
see and re-use multimedia files consistently with best practices for
attribution across a variety of channels (offline, PDF exports, mobile
platforms, MediaViewer, WikiWand, etc.)
In October, I created a dashboard to track how many files were missing
the machine-readable markers on each wiki [3]. Unfortunately, due to
the size of Commons, I needed to find another way to count them there.
Yesterday, I finished to implement the script for Commons, and started
to run it. As of today, we have accurate numbers for the quantity of
files missing machine-readable metadata on Commons: ~533,000, out of
~24 million [4]. It may seem like a lot, but I personally think it's a
great testament to the dedication of the Commons community.
Now that we have numbers, we can work on going through those files and
fixing them. Many of them are missing the {{information}} template,
but many of those are also part of a batch: either they were uploaded
by the same user, or they were mass-uploaded by a bot. In either case,
this makes it easier to parse the information and add the
{{information}} template automatically with a bot, thus avoiding
painful manual work.
I invite you to take a look at the list of files at
https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html and
see if you can find such groups and patterns.
Once you identify a pattern, you're encouraged to add a section to the
Bot Requests page on Commons, so that a bot owner can fix them:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Adding_the_In…
I believe we can make a lot of progress rapidly if we dive into the
list of files and fix all the groups we can find. The list and
statistics will be updated daily so it'll be easy to see our progress.
Let me know if you'd like to help but are unsure how!
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive
[2]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/11/07/cleaning-up-file-metadata-for-humans-…
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/
[4]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html
--
Guillaume Paumier
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Guillaume_(WMF)