File metadata cleanup drive

What is this?

On Wikimedia wikis, many files use templates like {{Information}} to store and show basic information like an image description or its author.

Humans can read and understand this, but automated tools need a little help to understand that "Jean-Luc Picard" is an author and that "CC-BY-SA" is a license. We need to make the information machine-readable, by adding hidden markers to the template.

Why are we doing this?

Machine-readable data makes it easier to reuse Wikimedia content consistently with best practices for attribution. Examples of tools that use existing machine-readable data include:

• the stockphoto gadget on Commons;
• WikiWand;
• Media Viewer (desktop and mobile);
• the VisualEditor media search dialog.

With machine-readable metadata, the mobile sites would be able to display information in a way that's adapted to smaller screens, instead of showing the full description page as it currently does. The PDF generator and offline readers like Kiwix are other tools that will benefit from this effort. Machine-readable data will also facilitate the transition to a structured data format in the future.

Note that wikis hosting non-free content are required to identify it in machine-readable format by the Board's Licensing policy.

What you can do:

• Check if your wiki has files missing machine-readable metadata;
• Add information templates to files that don't have one;
• Add machine-readable markers to information and copyright templates.

Tell other people

• Ask other Wikimedians to help with this cleanup on your wiki.