Wikimania 2017 - Day 2, Wikidata sessions, morning

New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons
Author of the submission: Jarek Tuszynski aka Jarekt
In May 2016, a longstanding feature of "arbitrary access" to Wikidata was activated on Commons allowing any page on Commons to access properties of any Wikidata item. This change finally allowed Commons to start using information from Wikidata and sharing information from Commons with larger community of Wikidata. Currently there are efforts to rewrite numerous infobox templates using Lua, and reconcile and move their content to Wikidata. That includes "Authority Control", "Creator", "Institution", "Artwork" and "Object location" templates. Details of this effort will be described and discussed. Commons is a multilingual project and we spend a lot of effort on providing information to the final users in their native language. This effort can be greatly improved by Wikidata, where each item can have labels in any language. In the years before Wikidata, a very specific template style was developed that used interwiki links to provide translated label and link to wikipedia article in users language. Those templates are being now replaced with calls to wikidata. Past and future work in this effort will be described and discussed. Wikimedia Commons is fundamentally different then Wikipedia projects, since it does not use main/article namespace much and most useful information resides in "File", "Category", "Template", "Creator" and "Institution" namespaces. As a result the way Wikidata links to Wikipedias is not ideal fit for Commons project. It is still unclear how "sitelinks" from Wikidata to Commons will be organized and the current state is a mix of several approaches, making Wikidata database unpredictable and hard to use. Several possible approaches and their consequences will be discussed. Differences between how Wikidata links to Wikipedias and Commons also affects tools used to perform much of work on Wikidata, making some of the most powerful tools not very useful.
Slides: https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Using_Wikidata_on_Commons_-_August_2017.pdf

Structured Commons: what changes are coming?
Author of the submission:Alex Stinson (User:Astinson (WMF)
The Wikimedia Foundation and WMDE are currently working to integrate structured data support with the the software that enable Wikidata, Wikibase, into Wikimedia Commons. This integration Commons allows a number of opportunities in both making Commons a more engage-able platform from editors and readers, improving discovery, organization and the pathway for small contributions in all of the languages supported by Wikimedia projects. Additionally, providing a better Metadata infrastructure allows for better uploading of content from partner Commons a more valuable platform for partner communities wanting to share their media and dynamically take advantage of our community's environment. Like Wikidata, structured data on multimedia files will allow for more dynamic results and improvements to how Commons content can be used both within and beyond the Wikimedia movement.

In this session, the Structured Data team will examine the updated plans for the project, with a focus on where current technological developments are focused, what we are learning from community engagement and research, and the projected opportunities for community engagement over the course of the upcoming year.

Moreover, as part of the discussion we will identify the challenges that we expect to be upcoming, as we select priorities for features and tools that empower our stakeholder communities to use the changing structures of Commons Multimedia. For example, we are anticipating a number of different challenges related to dealing with different types of data important to how Commons is currently curated, including but not limited to categories, information boxes and copyright statements.

The session includes time for questions about the program.

Slides: https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Structured_Data_on_Commons_-_What_changes_are_coming%3...