Skip to content

Category Archives: Commons

Inventory

The Cleveland Museum of Art recently released 30,000 images of art under CC-Zero (~public domain). Some of the good people on Wikimedia Commons have begun uploading them there, to be used, amongst others, by Wikipedia and Wikidata. But how to find the relevant Wikipedia article (if there is one) or Wikidata item for such a […]

What else?

Structured Data on Commons is approaching. I have done a bit of work on converting Infoboxes into statements, that is, to generate structured data. But what about using it? What could that look like? Inspired by a recent WMF blog post, I wrote a simple demo on what you might call “auto-categorisation”. You can try […]

On Topic

Wikidata already contains a lot of information about topics – people, places, concepts etc. It also contains topics that have a topic, e.g., a painting of a person, a biographical article about someone, a scientific publication about a species. Ideally, Wikidata also describes the connection between the work and the subject. Such connections can be […]

The File (Dis)connect

I’ll be going on about Wikidata, images, and tools. Again. You have been warned. I have written a few image-related Wikimedia tools over the years (such as FIST, WD-FIST, to name two big ones), because I believe that images in articles and Wikidata items are important, beyond their adorning effect. But despite everyone’s efforts, images […]

All your locations are belong to us

A recent push for a UK photography contest reminded me of an issue I have begrudged for a quite a while. On the talk page for that contest, I pointed to several tools of mine, dealing with images and locations. But they only show aspects of those, like “Wikidata items without images”. What about the others? WDQS can show maps of […]

Livin’ on the edge

A few days ago, Lydia posted about the first prototype of the new structured data system for Commons, based on Wikidata technology. While this is just a first step, structured data for Commons seems finally within reach. And that brings home the reality of over 32 million files on Commons, all having unstructured data about them, in the […]

First image, good image?

For a while now, Wikimedia pages (usually, Wikipedia articles) have a “page image”, an image from that page used as a thumbnail in article previews, e.g. in the mobile app. While it is not entirely clear to me how this is image is chosen, it appears to be the first image of the article in […]

A week of looking at women

Images and their use in the WikiVerse have always been a particular interest of mine, on Wikipedia, Commons, and of course, Wikidata. Commons holds the files and groups them by subject, author, or theme; Wikidata references images and files for key aspects of a subject; and Wikipedia uses them to enrich texts, and puts files […]

Of cats and pets

CatScan is one of these workhorse tools that are familiar to many Wikimedia users, all the way back to the toolserver. Its popularity, however, has also caused problems with reliability time and again. As Labs became usable, I added QuickIntersection to the mix, allowing for a quicker and more reliable service at the expense of […]

Add it to the pile!

I have previously blogged about Wikipedia-related page lists, and how they relate to many tools and activities. I also lamented my previous, failed attempts at introducing a “tool pipeline system”. Well, I am not one to give up easily! The latest, greatest iteration in this vein is PagePile. Essentially, this new tool is managing piles […]