On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
In the meantime, it might be an idea for folks to avoid claiming that any issue that pops up on Commons can be solved in Wikidata, unless they can produce a working case study rather than discussion about proposals.
One of the Commons parts that could benefit most from Wikidata are the content pages, aka Galleries. Right now they are volunteer-maintained and they look like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
But it doesn't need to be so, these pages could be automated, so the page is composed by querying images and sorting them automatically. Of course volunteer intervention would be also needed to define the queries, but it would be more sustainable than now (i.e. the page would be automatically updated with new images if they meet the query criteria). To achieve this it would be necessary to re-think Galleries, and consider other paradigms, like that used by IMSLP. Check for instance: http://imslp.org/wiki/Tristan_und_Isolde,_WWV_90_(Wagner,_Richard)
That is a page for the work, and the different expressions/files are structured in one page. This structure however is volunteer-maintained, but it is to consider each file as a metadata container, and the section as the result of a query. This approach is not followed in Commons, that is more "category-oriented".
Going back to the original "Sagrada Familia" gallery example: - the header data can be extracted from Wikidata with a Lua template. That can be done now, no need to wait, just needs a Lua template and connect with Wikidata via sitelink. - each section would be a query for instance "depicts:sagrada familia AND depicts:exterior". - each file would be needed to be tagged accordingly with structured data, and it would show up in the gallery page.
Galleries, thus, would become the hub where all media related to a subject could be accessed. That, of course, would be too many images, considering that just the "Towers of Sagrada familia" category has 159 images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Towers_of_the_Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADl...
That means that it would be needed to limit query results and define criteria to decide which images to show, and let the user expand the full query when wished. Or another page (gallery) could be created for the "Towers of Sagrada familia", which in turn could contain more queries for further details about the the towers "depicts:sagrada familia AND depicts:exterior AND depicts:right tower AND NOT depicts:left tower". Categories would be rendered superfluous, with the focus shifted towards maintaining queries and the proper description of image files with structured data.
Anyhow, these are just some ideas to show that there are different ways of working with media that might be more effective in the long run.
Cheers, Micru