User:Jarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons

Abstract

Last May a longstanding feature of "arbitrary access" to Wikidata was activated on Commons allowing any page on Commons to access properties of any Wikidata item. This change finally allowed Commons to start using information from Wikidata and sharing information from Commons with larger community of Wikidata. Currently there are efforts to rewrite numerous infobox templates using Lua, and reconcile and move their content to Wikidata. That includes "Authority Control", "Creator", "Institution", "Artwork" and "Object location" templates. Details of this effort will be described and discussed.

Commons is a multilingual project and we spend a lot of effort on providing information to the final users in their native language. This effort can be greatly improved by Wikidata, where each item can have labels in any language. In the years before Wikidata, a very specific template style was developed that used interwiki links to provide translated label and link to wikipedia article in users language. Those templates are being now replaced with calls to wikidata. Past and future work in this effort will be described and discussed.

Wikimedia Commons is fundamentally different then Wikipedia projects, since it does not use main/article namespace much and most useful information resides in "File", "Category", "Template", "Creator" and "Institution" namespaces. As a result the way Wikidata links to Wikipedias is not ideal fit for Commons project. It is still unclear how "sitelinks" from Wikidata to Commons will be organized and the current state is a mix of several approaches, making Wikidata database unpredictable and hard to use. Several possible approaches and their consequences will be discussed. Differences between how Wikidata links to Wikipedias and Commons also affects tools used to perform much of work on Wikidata, making some of the most powerful tools not very useful.

Intro timeline

• January 2013 - Wikidata phase I went live on Wikipedia projects allowing storage of interwiki links in a single place as Wikidata sitelinks.
• September 2013 - Wikidata phase I went live on Commons, with little notice since most interwiki links on Commons were from Commons categories to Wikipedia articles and back then there was a semi-consensus that sitelinks should not be between pages in different namespaces
• September 2015 - Arbitrary access to Wikidata properties was enabled on English Wikipedia allowing calls like {{#property:P36|from=Q183}}
• April 2016 - Arbitrary access was enabled on Commons, which finally made Wikidata useful to Commons.

Purpose of Infobox templates on Commons

• Many files come from various institutions which store the metadata in variety of formats with many different types of fields. When transferring files to Commons we would not want to loose any of th.
• Commons serves all Wikimedia projects and users of Commons speak many different languages. Our goal is to show as much information as possible in the language of the viewer.
• Making metadata machine readable

Commons Infoboxes

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Source
Author

– default template meant especially for photographs created by users. 31123267

– for paintings, artworks and artifacts held by museums and other GLAM institutions 905582

– for photographs held by museums and other GLAM institutions 754093

Photograph

– for photographs of artworks with more fields for photographer metadata 453

– for books 637324

Georeferencing

Georeference the map in Wikimaps Warper If inappropriate please set warp_status = skip to hide.

– for maps 18321

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Source

– for music files 722

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Source
Author

–

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Source
Author

with extra "location" field

– for coat of arms files 22258

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Source
Author

– for information about buses 2914

– for information about aircrafts 87847

DescriptionJarekt/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons	This is a spoken word version of the Wikipedia article: [{{fullurl:wikipedia:{{{title}}}|oldid= }} {{{title}}}] Listen to this article (audio help) See also: List of spoken articles and Spoken Wikipedia WikiProject.
Source	Own recording by the speaker Derivative of [{{fullurl:wikipedia:{{{title}}}|oldid= }} {{{title}}}]
Author	Speaker: Unknown author Authors of the article

- for audio files of people reading wikipedia articles 5590

Examplum examplum

- for images of biological specimens with known scientific names 66360