Community Wishlist/Wishes/Do something about Google & DuckDuckGo search not indexing media files and categories on Commons
Description
It is essentially semi-censorship by Google and harms Internet users, Internet neutrality, the Internet ecosystem, Commons contributors, free media, and Wikimedia Commons.
- Videos on Wikimedia Commons are not showing in the video tab of Google and DuckDuckGo (and some other Google alternatives) even when searching for their exact title.
- Most files on Commons are not showing in the Images tab even when they're high-quality and/or highly relevant and much better than most of the other things and websites the image search shows files of.
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I think the bad state of indexing is the most urgent and top-priority issue of Commons, even before getting more developers (volunteers) to help out with code issues and priority technical issues themselves. All the time and effort (lots of it) people spend on meticulously organizing, maintaining, and populating the site doesn't mean much if people don't know about and find the site and the files and category pages on it. I think the movement and WMF owe it to the Commons contributors to make their work not get semi-censored and be available to the world which would also boost the platform via more new users & more contributions & more media. I don't think any other websites has as many free or well-organized media files but despite of that it's barely used. One could make the site as great as you want via technical innovations or by uploading high-quality media but if people don't know about and can't find its files, it's largely mute and wasted time and effort.
The concrete suggestions of this proposals are that something is done about it in the very near future by the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community/ies:
- WMF investigating why this is occurring and gather any relevant information such as evidence of this, a dataset of examples of indexed and nonindexed files which could then be published in some blog-post
- WMF asking Google about why WMC is in large part not indexed in written form and this doesn't even seem to be some SEO-type issue or downranking, most files seem to not be indexed at all including all(?) videos
- An open letter signed by Wikimedia community asking Google, DDG (& Co?) to change this – an open letter could build momentum, clarify this problem, maybe get some attention of digital policymakers and the news media, as well as get the community to work on solving this
Related wish: (Commons) file description pages should be indexable by (Google) search
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
Wikimedia Commons
Affected users
all Web users, Commons contributors, free media ecosystem/users
Other details
- Created: 15:38, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
- Last updated: 07:53, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)