Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Multilingual Captions released to Wikimedia Commons

Before you start writing...

We've found that answering the questions below will be incredibly helpful in structuring your thinking.

• Who is the audience you intend to reach?

Everyone.

• What is your goal with writing this post?

Let people know about a new feature for Commons that will expand the global reach of file contributions.

• What is the two sentence high-level overview of this piece? (Note: This might be able to serve as your summary.)

Headline and summary

Ideally three to ten words, the headline to your piece will show up in social media shares and on the blog's homepage.

• ...

The summary will appear separately in italicized text underneath the photo; it can be up to fifty words.

• File captions provide short descriptions of a file's content that are easy to submit, edit, and translate.

Author

• Keegan (WMF)

Image(s)

If you have freely licensed images in mind, please put them here. While we don't use screenshots as lead images, we're more than happy to place one or more in the body of the post.* Good image repositories: Commons featured, quality, valued; Pixabay; other public domain image sites; images.google.com with "labeled for reuse" selected.

*Please also put links to the images or screenshots.

Body

The Structured Data on Commons development team is happy to announce the release of multilingual file captions to Wikimedia Commons. File captions provide short descriptions of a file's content that are easy to submit, edit, and translate. Captions are the first feature release for the Structured Data project.

Wikimedia Commons holds over fifty million freely-licensed media files. These millions of images, sounds, video, documents, three-dimensional files and more contain a vast amount of information related to the contents of the file and the the context for the world around them. As Commons has collected files over the years, the volunteers who curate and maintain the site have developed a system to contain and present this information to the world, using MediaWiki, wikitext, and templates. <another background sentence or two here relating this to SDC>

A description template is the first and primary way information about a file is show to users. These templates can be a powerful tool for displaying information about files; descriptions provide meaningful context and information about the work presented. Descriptions can be as long as the user would like, providing wikimarkup and links for others to find out more. Description templates can also hold translations by adding language fields. However, the Structured Data team some some areas that a feature like captions could improve upon from descriptions templates.

Multilingual captions help share the burden of descriptions by providing a space to describe a file in a way that is standard across all files, easy to translate, and easy to use. Captions do not support wikitext so there is no knowledge needed of how to links work in this space — links can still be provided in the more expansive file description. Captions are added during the upload process using the UploadWizard, or they can be added directly on any file page on Commons.The translation feature for captions is a simple interface that requires only a few steps to create and share a caption translation.

<another paragraph on captions, tying it to other efforts at expanding language support?> The "multilingual" in "multilingual captions" highlights a primary focus of Structured Data features: opening up access to Commons to as many languages as possible beyond its present capabilities. This is enormously beneficial to the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia Foundations' mission of sharing knowledge with the world. In addition to captions, future features planned provide supporting adding "statements" from Wikidata to files, effectively describing them in an organized way that can be accessed by programs and bots to present media. These statements can be multilingual as Wikidata supports translations, which will make statements searchable in any language that has a translation provided. <maybe>Another planned feature release will provide licensing attribution for media in a requested language</maybe>

<ending paragraph, inviting people to use captions>

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