Photo by Ajepbah, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

The Wikimedia Foundation, with a US$3,015,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is leading an effort to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest repository of freely licensed educational media. The project will support contributors’ efforts to integrate Commons’ media more readily into the rest of the web, making it easier for people and institutions to share, access, and reuse high-quality and free educational content.

Wikimedia Commons includes more than 35 million freely licensed media files—photos, audio, and video—ranging from stunning photos of geographic landscapes to donations from institutions with substantial media collections, like the Smithsonian, NASA, and the British Library. Like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has become a “go-to” source on the internet—used by everyone from casual browsers to major media outlets to educational institutions, and easily discoverable through search engines. It continues to rapidly grow every year: Volunteer contributors added roughly six million new files in 2016.

Today, the rich images and media in Wikimedia Commons are described only by casual notation, making it difficult to fully explore and use this remarkable resource. The generous contribution from the Sloan Foundation will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to connect Wikimedia Commons with Wikidata, the central storage for structured data within the  Wikimedia projects. Wikidata will empower Wikimedia volunteers to transform Wikimedia Commons into a rich, easily-searchable, and machine-readable resource for the world.

Over three years, the Wikimedia Foundation will develop infrastructure, tools, and community support to enable the work of contributors, who have long requested a way to add more precise, multilingual and reusable data to media files. This will support new uses of Commons’ media, from richer and more dynamic illustration of articles on Wikipedia, to helping new users, like museums, remix the media in their own applications. Structured data will also be compatible with and support Wikimedia Commons’ partnership communities, including “GLAM” institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) that have donated thousands of images in recent years. With the introduction of structured data on Commons, GLAM institutions will be able to more easily upload media and integrate existing metadata into Wikimedia Commons and share their collections with the rest of the web.

“At Wikimedia, we believe the world should have access to the sum of all knowledge, from encyclopedia articles to archival images,” said Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She continued:

Wikimedia Commons is a vast library of freely licensed photography, video, and audio that illustrates knowledge and the internet itself. With this project, and in partnership with the Wikimedia community of volunteer contributors, we hope to expand the free and open internet by supporting new applications of the millions of media files on Wikimedia Commons. We are grateful for the generous support of the Sloan Foundation, our longtime funders, in this important work.

“We are delighted to continue our near-decade-long support of Wikimedia with this potentially game-changing grant to unlock millions of media files—the most common form of modern communication and popular education, growing exponentially each year—into a universal format that can be read and reused not just by Wikipedia’s hundreds of millions of readers in nearly 300 languages but by educational, cultural and scientific organizations and by anyone doing a Google search or using the web,” said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

At a time when the World Wide Web, like the rest of the world, is beset by increasing polarization, commercialization, and narrowing, Wikipedia continues to serve as a shining, global counter-example of open collaborative knowledge sharing and consensus building presented in a reliable context with a neutral point of view, free of fake news and false information, that emphasizes how we can come together to build the sum of all human knowledge. We all need Wikipedia, its sister projects, its technology, and its values, now more than ever.

The Wikimedia Foundation is partnering on this project with Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland), the independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the Wikimedia projects in Germany. Wikimedia Germany incubated and oversaw Wikidata’s initial operations, and continues to manage Wikidata’s technical and engineering roadmap. The project will be overseen in consultation with the Wikimedia community of volunteer contributors on collaboration and community support. The USD$3,015,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation will be given over a three year period.

For more information, please visit the structured data page on Wikimedia Commons.

Related — Related

Read further in the pursuit of knowledge

Communications Community Picture of the Year Wikimedia Commons

‘Unfrogettable’ picture of the year announced

Whichever frog pun (or caption) you choose to label it with, the photo above is this year’s Wikimedia Commons picture of the year. It features two Phyllomedusa rohdei, frogs endemic to Brazil, with one stepping on the other’s head, seemingly reaching for something just out of the frame. The photo was taken by biologist Renato Augusto….

Communications Community From the archives Photo contests

The stories behind this year’s award-winning photographs from Wiki Loves Africa

Late last year, photographers from around the world were invited to share their photos of people at work on the African continent. Over 18,000 were submitted. Here are the winners.

Help us unlock the world’s knowledge.

As a nonprofit, Wikipedia and our related free knowledge projects are powered primarily through donations.

Donate

Connect — Connect

Stay up-to-date about the Wikimedia Foundation

Get email updates

Subscribe to news about ongoing projects and initiatives.

Contact a human

Questions about the Wikimedia Foundation or our projects? Get in touch with our team.

Photo credits

sprinkenhof_hamburg-altstadt-innenhof-1-29135-ajb

Perereca-macaco - Phyllomedusa rohdei

Renato Augusto Martins

CC BY-SA 4.0

Darius Kazemi headshot

Jennifer Brommer

CC BY 4.0

Gift_of_the_Ocean
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2017/01/09/sloan-foundation-structured-data/
wikimediafoundation.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-18
44975
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5GEFOYK2MLCBAIBHGDYDMAIMFN47HN7M
<urn:uuid:ff2258e3-6855-4f47-aee9-708c99fdf12f>
2019-04-21T00:43:58Z
192.0.66.2
text/html
sha1:4ACMF6SXBWPBHUY74XAJWWZ52UZNHCB4
<urn:uuid:76648203-ce3a-4c86-aa3b-efe83768c674>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2017/01/09/sloan-foundation-structured-data/
response
<urn:uuid:7819fa99-2f0a-4664-985f-9d83d931bc29>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-144-182-216.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/