Saturday, October 18, 2014

Bringing #Wikidata to #Commons, one step at a time

There is this big project that is to bring structured data to the 23,422,581 media files that make up one of the biggest resources of freely usable media files.

It is to bring many different benefits to the users of Commons. To accomplish this many steps have to be taken. Many of these steps can already be taken and will indicate why this project is done and, what its benefits are.

Take for instance Mr Daniel Havell. He is an English engraver born in  Reading. There is no Wikipedia article about him but there is information about him in Wikidata. It includes all the information that is in his "Creator" template and the category about him on Commons.

Having such information for all the "Creators" on Wikidata is easy and obvious. Having all those templates refer to Wikidata builds an anticipation of things to come. Next steps are making sure that the information looks good on Wikidata and is informative. Currently the best we can offer is by showing the information in Reasonator.

Using tools like Reasonator for now establishes that the WMF and the Wikidata team appreciates all the efforts that promote the use of Wikidata and accepts it as indicative of the type of information it will have to bring.

This can all be done today. No waiting is necessary and it makes data from Commons available in multiple languages. This is Mr Havell in Russian. Bringing the benefits of Wikidata to Commons today helps. It brings awareness to our public of the inherent benefits. It allows them to comment and get involved slowly but surely. It will prevent a "big bang" announcement of this is "it",take it or leave it. It will even bring more information in more languages to Commons sooner rather than later.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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