On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:10 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hay Kranen created a proof of concept where Commons is searched for > pictures that (per standard) use a "depicts" statement. This is a beautiful proof of concept; thank you for sharing it, Gerard, and thank you, Hay, for developing it. It really illustrates the power and importance of the Structured Data efforts. To pick a different example, imagine that you want to illustrate an article about the importance of wheelchair accessibility at your university. You might try a major search engine like Google Images. Try replacing the word "wheelchair" with translations in other languages. Note how the result sets are different, and how you may get a much smaller set of results in languages with a smaller Internet presence. https://www.google.com/search?q=wheelchair&tbm=isch (English) https://www.google.com/search?q=kitimaguru&tbm=isch (Swahili, far less relevant and smaller set) In contrast, the use of Wikidata items means that, as long as a label exists for a given language, you can search in _any_ language and get the same images: https://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/sdsearch/#q=haswbstatement:P180=Q191931 The fact that the UI of this tool is currently English is an implementation detail; even with Hay's implementation, you can type in "kitimaguru" and get the same results as in English. It would be wonderful to see this functionality developed further, and to ultimately make this kind of search functionality central to the user experience for Wikimedia Commons, so that speakers of any language are given _meaningful_ access to freely reusable media. Warmly, Erik _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
