Wikimedia Foundation GLAM team/Office Hours/October 2020

October meeting: Structured Data Across Wikimedia

The October meetings were about Structured Data. We were joined by Carly Bogen, the Foundation's Program Manager for Structured Data, who shared insights into media search and introduced the Structured Data Across Wikimedia project. We were also joined by Alicia Fagerving and David Haskiya, who shared Wikimedia Sweden's plans for structured data on Wiki Loves Monuments contributions.

Presentations

• Carly Bogen, Structured Data Across Wikimedia (SDAW)
• Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sweden x Structured Data on Commons

Discussion

Carly's presentation introduced the Structured Data Across Wikipedia (SDAW) project, which has the following goals:

• Allow machines to recognize Wikimedia content and suggest relations to other Wikimedia content.
• Design a way to structure articles and pages to enable new content formats.
• Give Wikimedia users a more inviting, more efficient way to search and find content.

So far, the product team has focused on an improved Media Search for Commons. The new Media Search:

• has an image-focused user interface that will make it easier to find what you're looking for and to discover new things.
• generates a set of search results that utilizes structured data and is more language-agnostic.
• has filters for media types and tabs for audio, videos, and categories results

Carly explained how Wikimedians and institutions can improve the search relevance of a file:

• Add a descriptive title
• Add captions in multiple languages
• Add a detailed description
• Add the file to the relevant categories
• Add depicts statements

This is described in more detail in a new Help page for Media Search.

Carly noted that the “mark as prominent” feature needs to be used more consistently if it is to be included in the search algorithm.

The structured data team will soon add a license filter, which will only use license data contained in structured data statements, so it’s very important that the GLAM community adds license information to the statements.

Finally, Carly posed two questions for the community:

• Should the depicts statements on Wikidata be added to the Commons search index?
• What other Wikimedia statements could most usefully be added to search?

Wikimedia Sweden’s presentation introduced a project that will use Structured Data on Commons to improve discovery and use of Wiki Loves Monuments images. WMSE will add at least 250,000 new ‘’Depicts’’ and ‘’Participant in’’ statements to Sweden’s Wiki Loves Monuments entries, focusing on those that have relevant Wikidata items. They will share their process and tools, which could be useful for other Wiki Loves campaigns or for museums that have added depicts information to Wikidata.

There were more than 30 attendees across the two sessions, with good representation from cultural institutions, affiliates, and the broader community. At the end, there was a conversation about less useful depicts statements being added to Commons and how to prioritize the creation of tools to help with quality control and maintenance.

You can also view the collective notes in Etherpad.