ISA Tool

English

Wikimedia Commons exists since 2005 to store images under a free license on a central server, that can be used on Wikipedia and other applications.^[1] Originally the image description was done using special templates. Since 2019 it registers structured metadata about pictures using a dedicated Wikibase^[2] instance.^[3] The image upload process is extended to optionally register additional metadata for each uploaded file. As for Wikidata the license is CC0.^[4]

Wiki Loves Heritage	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022

The ISA Tool (Information Structured Acceleration) is a crowd editing tool that can be used to easily describe media files on Wikimedia Commons. It wants to stimulate the addition and amelioration of metadata after an image has been uploaded. It is a simple mobile application that can also be used in a browser. It was originally developed for the Wiki Loves Africa campaign, but it can be extended to any other project using Wikimedia Commons.

A campaign can be setup using one or more Wikimedia Commons categories. Anybody with a Wikimedia account can create a campaign. To register your edits you must be logged in. For each image presented the participants can add:

Depicts: uniquely identify the object (using one or more Qid), with a link to Wikidata
Captions: a one-line short description of the item (multilingual; can be used with Infoboxes)
other metadata can be added later (manually, or via bots)

The metadata can be used to:

write queries to search for images (e.g. c:Special:Search/P180:Q65587733 or haswbstatement:P180=Q65587733)
to automatically display captions ((P2096))
to describe the origin of the material

Example campaign: Wiki Loves Heritage 2019

Missing functionality

Skipping images which already have a (P180) statement

Known problems

It seems not possible to store a structured description
Login before making updates, not to loose pending data entry

References

↑ Did you know that any (private) MediaWiki server can transparently use any media file from Wikimedia Commons?
↑ The same technology as used by Wikidata; actually both database instances are linked (Linked open data).
↑ The project "Structured Metadata for Wikimedia Commons".
↑ The base license of the image remains unchanged, including the embedded description text.

[1] Did you know that any (private) MediaWiki server can transparently use any media file from Wikimedia Commons?

[2] The same technology as used by Wikidata; actually both database instances are linked (Linked open data).

[3] The project "Structured Metadata for Wikimedia Commons".

[4] The base license of the image remains unchanged, including the embedded description text.

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[2]

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ISA Tool

Contents

Missing functionality

Known problems

See also

References