User:Dereckson/Mentoring/Wikimedia Commons projects

Mission statements

 * Wikimedia Commons aim
 * The aim of Wikimedia Commons is to provide a media file repository:
 * that makes available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to all, and
 * that acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
 * The expression “educational” is to be understood according to its broad meaning of “providing knowledge; instructional or informative”.


 * Personal mission statement
 * Aim to make Wikimedia Commons a world-class media repository, increasing the possibilities to interact with the content.

TwitterCards
Extension:TwitterCards, by Harsh Kothari, will include the metadata required to print Twitter cards, content block on Twitter feeds showing a picture from a link, with the description, author and license.

This extension will also act as a showcase of:
 * (i) the possibilities to let external services describe our content;
 * (ii) the interest of the developers community to get things done to provide semantic and machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons;
 * (iii) the interest of the developers community to play well with other actors leaders, to better disseminate and properly describe already naturally disseminated content.

Allow smoother and easier Wikimedia Commons pictures discovery
Skills: Programming. Design.

[//commons.wikimedia.org Wikimedia Commons] is 14 million media repository, all under a free license or in public domain. This is a common repository used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and available for any other projects in need of educative or informational pictures.

Previous usability and UI effort were focused on the upload process and image reusing.

This project is to think, design and develop a better interface to browse and discover pictures, from a user perspective. For example, it has been suggested to implement a lightbox system to switch to the next picture in the categories. A part of the project could be to prepare an external website to implement this lightbox and so offer a similar browsing experience than other popular pictures sites. If the interface works well, a second phase could be to integrate it directly to Wikimedia Commons.

Another idea is a view mode allowing to browse a root category (e.g. the cats category or the roses category and to be able to see pictures in this category and also the subcategories). This will satisfy the need "I want a cat photo" or "I want a rose photo" without having to browse a dozen of specialized subcategory. In a second step, we could filter result with available information. If you're interested to implement this approach, your project could be whether:
 * the design and development of the viewer mode, with a focus on the UI and ergonomic browser capability
 * to prepare this second step and identify the most relevant criteria (weight, resolution, taken date, color information, most used files on wikis, images with labels) and analyze cost/benefits to cache these data; prepare a prototype with a subset of 1000 images to help to create a performance model and see how in the future have this information could be available for several millions of pictures.

Mentor: Sébastien Santoro

Build an interwiki notifications framework and implement it for InstantCommons
Skills: Programming. Software architecture.

In January 2010, we introduced a setting to ease the possibility to reuse the Wikimedia Commons content on other MediaWiki installations. This feature is called “InstantCommons”.

The Wikimedia Commons community performs a continuous maintenance on wiki files, renaming and deleting media. We currently have tools to detect if the media are used on Wikimedia projects, and tools to replace automatically the names following a rename operation.

It would be interesting to allow wikis (and 3rd party software) to notify Wikimedia Commons they use pictures through a notification API. It would also be interesting if these wikis can subscribe to notifications, so we can notify them back we’ve made a destructive operation (e.g. rename or delete a media file currently in use on their website), so they can automatically or manually take appropriate measures.

This project is to develop an interwiki notifications framework, ideally also open to 3rd party sites, and to use it to implement it to enhance the InstantCommons feature.

Mentor: Sébastien Santoro