File metadata cleanup drive

File metadata cleanup

Progress

How to fix files

The File metadata cleanup drive was an effort started in September 2014 by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its goal is to fix file description pages and tweak templates to ensure that multimedia files consistently contain machine-readable metadata across Wikimedia wikis.

What is this? On Wikimedia wikis, many files use templates like {{Information}} to store and show basic information like an image description or its author. Humans can read and understand this, but automated tools need a little help to understand that "Jean-Luc Picard" is an author and that "CC-BY-SA" is a license. We need to make the information machine-readable, by adding hidden markers to the template. Why are we doing this? Machine-readable data makes it easier to reuse Wikimedia content consistently with best practices for attribution. Examples of tools that use existing machine-readable data include: the stockphoto gadget on Commons; WikiWand; Media Viewer (desktop and mobile); the VisualEditor media search dialog. With machine-readable metadata, the mobile sites would be able to display information in a way that's adapted to smaller screens, instead of showing the full description page as it currently does. The PDF generator and offline readers like Kiwix are other tools that will benefit from this effort. Machine-readable data will also facilitate the transition to a structured data format in the future. Note that wikis hosting non-free content are required to identify it in machine-readable format by the Board's Licensing policy.

Get involved What you can do: Check if your wiki has files missing machine-readable metadata; Add information templates to files that don't have one; Add machine-readable markers to information and copyright templates. Tell other people Ask other Wikimedians to help with this cleanup on your wiki. Over a third of all files have been fixed. Help us fix the rest!

Sign-up list

Sign up below if you're interested in helping to clean up metadata on file information pages across wikis. There will also be a dedicated page on Commons, focusing on files hosted there.

• Guillaume (WMF) (all wikis that I can decipher with translation tools)
• TheDJ
• User:Jean-Frédéric
• Tfinc (talk) 17:17, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
• Superm401
• Slowking4
• Josve05a (talk) (on Commons, and possibly, but unlikely, on enwp)
• Nick (talk) (English Wikipedia and Commons)
• Keegan (English Wikipedia and Commons)
• Stryn
• KuboF (Esperanto Wikipedia)
• Romaine (talk) - Commons, have done some work already earlier
• PKM (talk) (Commons, possibly EN Wikipedia)
• geraki (Greek (el) Wikipedia)
• Senator2029 (Commons and English Wikipedia)
• putnik (Russian Wikipedia)
• NahidSultan (Commons and Bengali Wikipedia)
• Mdann52 (Commons and enwiki, others if needed)
• circeberman (Commons mostly and English Wikipedia)
• User:JackPotte (French Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikiversity)
• Aftab (Bengali Wikipedia)
• Kwj2772 (Commons & KO Wikipedia)
• Basvb (talk) (Commons, more specific dutch language on Commons)
• Grind24
• MA (Meta-Wiki primary)
• User:朝彦 (Japanese projects)
• Ibrahim.ID (Commons, Arabic Wikipedia and Other Projects in Arabic also)
• Liuxinyu970226 (talk) (Chinese Wikis)
• User:Jarekt (Commons - mostly working with templates)
• User:Perhelion (Commons - De Wikipedia)
• Arnd (Commons - mostly working with files)
• Rehman (Commons, English Wikipedia)
• --Juandev (talk) 11:42, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
• --MB-one (talk) 15:38, 16 June 2017 (UTC) (de-wiki, de-wikivoyage, commons)