GLAM/Newsletter/April 2019/Contents/Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue IV, April 2019

Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report

Upcoming releases, and GLAM pilot projects

Welcome to the new, and separate, This Month in GLAM report about Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (SDC).

The project Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons adds functionalities for structured and machine-readable data to files on Wikimedia Commons, so that they become easier to view, search, edit, organize and re-use. To achieve that, the Commons backend is migrated to Wikibase, the same technology as used for Wikidata.

Structured Data on Commons (SDC) general info portal
Development page (not always up to date)
GLAM pilot projects with Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons
New features of SDC:
Glossary of SDC terms

What is already released, and what is coming?

Already released on SDC: File Captions and Depicts

In early May 2019, you can already add multilingual file captions and Depicts statements on Wikimedia Commons.

An example of structured data added to this photo of the Monument Demba et Dupont, a public sculpture in Dakar, Senegal:

File captions

File pages on Wikimedia Commons now contain a field where you can add - and translate - multilingual file captions that describe the file. The text in these captions is included in Wikimedia Commons' search function.

Depicts statements

File pages now include a 'Structured data' tab. When you click this tab, you can add 'Depicts' information about the things (people, places, species...) that are shown in the file. In this case, the photo shows the war memorial Monument Demba et Dupont in Dakar, Senegal in the foreground (hence marked as 'prominent'). In the background you see Dakar Station.

Depicts of depicts

This is not a screenshot of the same file, but of the Wikidata item Q61483227 that represents the sculpture itself. Many files on Wikimedia Commons can depict this artwork! Do note that, on Wikidata, there is further information on what the sculpture itself depicts (a Senegalese Tirailleur).
It is not necessary to include this information on the file itself. Later this year, the search function on Wikimedia Commons will support 'Depicts of depicts': when a file on Wikimedia Commons depicts a Wikidata item that itself has Depicts statements, those depicted things (people, species, objects...) will be discoverable on Wikimedia Commons too.

Upcoming releases

In the next iterations, the following features will be released on Wikimedia Commons:

Add depicts statements in UploadWizard
Search depicts statements
Depicts qualifiers
Other statements than depicts
Filter search results
Depicts of depicts
Depicts and annotations

GLAM pilot projects

At this moment, several community members and GLAM partners are working on the first GLAM pilot projects for Structured Data on Commons. You can find the overview of projects here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/GLAM/Projects

This month we highlight the ongoing work on a Wikimedia Commons microcontributions tool: ISA.

ISA is a fun, multilingual, mobile-first 'microcontributions' tool, that makes it easy for (groups of inexperienced) people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.

With ISA, you can choose a pre-defined set of images on Commons and then ask contributors to 'tag' these with multilingual structured metadata. Points are counted for each contribution, and therefore it is possible to organize 'tagging' or microcontributions competitions or challenges with ISA.
ISA is originally built to provide better multilingual and structured descriptions of c:Wiki Loves Africa images. But it is also developed to be useful to all of the Wiki Loves competitions, and eventually for all media files on Wikimedia Commons.
ISA is developed as a collaboration between Wiki In Africa, Histropedia and the Structured Data on Commons project.
What does the name mean? 'Isa' is the chiShona language word for 'put' or 'place', but it can also serve as an acronym for Information Structured Acceleration, Information Structure Additions and more.
- Access the tool (please note it is still under heavy development!): https://tools.wmflabs.org/isa/
- Follow (or contribute to) the development process on Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/3981/

Two design mock-ups (please note that this is work in progress!):

Mock-up design for the screen where participants will describe images
Mock-up design for the home page of a 'tagging' campaign for campaign managers inside the ISA tool