Hi, It's my great pleasure to announce Commons Walkabout, a new site that lets you drill down and browse through the media files on Wikimedia Commons using the structured data tagged on each file:
https://commonswalkabout.org/ The genesis of this project is that I just recently learned about structured data on Commons - I had heard the term before, but thought it meant people uploading public CSV files or something like that; but no, it's a way to tag files. It turns out that this is a source of frustration for Commons editors and users, because there is already a massive amount of data associated with the files, but very limited ways to query any of that data - which seems like a waste, and also means that it's hard to find anything specific on Commons, even more so if you don't speak English. Thinking about it, I realized that this was essentially the same problem that I, and another guy, Sahaj Khandelwal, had tried to solve for Wikidata, with the site Wikidata Walkabout. [1] There, too, it was a matter of building a user-friendly interface around SPARQL queries - in fact, the SPARQL queries for both sites are very similar, since Commons' structured data just uses Wikidata properties. I spent a few days modifying the code behind Wikidata Walkabout to be able to handle the Commons data, and the result is the site you now see. There are a few differences in the implementation: the most noticeable difference is that Commons Walkabout displays a thumbnail for each result, rather than just a name. The Commons query engine also requires a login, whereas Wikidata's doesn't, which meant a little bit of extra work on the back-end. Thanks to Brian Wolff for giving some pointers on how to get around this problem. I hope people enjoy it! Please note the language selection tool in the upper corner - this tool is meant to be usable in many languages. I look forward to hearing any questions or comments. And I hope this is a tool that will help improve the experience of Commons, which I think is one of the world's most remarkable resources. -Yaron [1] https://wikidatawalkabout.org/ -- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com
_______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
