View it! Tool/WREN notes

On Wednesday, August 31, 2022 the team did a virtual presentation & conversation during the Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network monthly meeting, but anyone was allowed to attend. Public announcement was made on the View it! page as well as to several telegrams channels and Wiki-pages among other channels.

The meeting was recorded and is linked on the View it! page or you can watch it here.

Presentation: "Discoverability, Structured Data & The View it! tool" with live demonstration

Attendees: There were around 33 people in attendance.

Discussion (The discussion was a mix of questions and answers (which will be noted with Q: & A:) and comments/notes.

• Q: Is there some kind of plug-in architecture for adding out Wikibase sites than Wikicommons? Another user (User:Fuzheado) is looking into using config files.

• • A: We will look into this

• Q: How is this tool better than Commons search? The results are quite similar to what you see when following a Commons category. Ex: View it! results vs. Commons Category for Sam Simmons (comedian) and View it! results vs. Commons Category for Namikawa Yasuyuki

• • A: It may not be an improvement, but it will provide better access. Think of it as an easier way to search Commons (if you're already adept at searching Commons, you may not need the tool). We will work to refine the logic of the results and extend the search/make advance search easier. Since structured data is still being developed, the search results will not be perfect. But increasing the visibility of structured data will help editors see the purpose of using and editing structured data.

• We are working on addressing data issues related to how to address images that don't belong in a category and how to sort/weight results to prevent repetitive image returns.

• The tool does work across all Wikipedia projects (including Wikidata); we are working to make it multi-lingual so the button will translate to language of the project it is in use on

• Many see the benefit for new editors, and use on smaller Wikis (dag.wikipedia.org was a given example). As well as possibly useful to various editing projects (Wikipedia:WikiProject_Craft for example

User interface:

• We are also working on the UI of the tool - it's current state is most likely not how the final product will look.

• • There have been suggestions for it to be a button, an editing button, or left hand menu item

• • Other suggestions have included a hyperlink/prompting to show if a higher resolution image is available, or to view a set if an image in an article belongs to a larger set

Future functionality will hopefully include:

• Results opening in a new window, rather than moving away from the current article

• Or possibly, results opening in a dialogue box like a gallery

• If able to open as a dialogue box, the ability to easily insert an image an editor may find in the results (with the caption generating from Commons)

Other considerations:

• Working to be able to add qualifiers to the search, like location.

• Ability to "like images" or "find images like this" that would show similar images, images from the same author/uploader, etc.

• Possibility to edit related data, e.g. removing images from categories where they do not belong