Improved discovery of media files (Community Wishlist/FA7)
Long-term opportunity
Description
Volunteers are concerned that Commons media is not indexed by third-party search engines, such as Google and DuckDuckGo, and suggest that discovery could be improved through machine-assisted translation of categories and OEmbed on social media and other websites.
There are also ideas to improve our own media search, such as adding a date range filter and making it possible to search visually using an image.
Other details
- Created: 21:20, 11 December 2024
- Last updated: 16:02, 4 October 2025
Wishes in this focus area
Below is a list of wishes that have informed this focus area. More wishes may be added to this table over time. Voting for the focus area is not a guarantee that each wish will be explicitly delivered; rather, the wishes are suggestive of the problem at large. Once a focus area is adopted, the respective team will work alongside communities to prioritize and deliver on the most impactful solutions.
Voting
This focus area currently has 13 supporters. Voting for this focus area is open until it is completed.
Supporters of this area
Support there's lots of useful media on Commons but it's not found by people searching the Web or reading Wikipedia (WP). They are also not found by Wikipedians – many WP articles are without illustrations even when there are high-quality images & videos on Commons. Media can make WP more interesting and help explain/visualize the subject. Its not just there for hosting WP files – it has >111 million files. Most categories only get a handful of views per month. Why should one contribute to the site if its well-organized media is largely excluded from Web search results? Commons is the 2nd largest Wikimedia project and is very far from its potential. Sorting and filtering by date would also be useful, currently one can only sort by date uploaded. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:37, 11 December 2024
Support HyperGaruda (talk) 10:23, 16 December 2024
Support I think a lot of improvements could be made to both Commons' Special:MediaSearch and how we are advertising our media to search engines. Nosferattus (talk) 18:56, 17 December 2024
Support Making content more accessible is a great idea for us and the public reusers, Vulcan strongly supports. VulcanSphere (talk) 01:56, 6 April 2025
Support A lot of these would directly help improve Commons' reach and impact. Eiim (talk) 00:45, 17 July 2025
Support Rasputin 93 (talk) 23:06, 23 July 2025
Support Una tantum (talk) 11:53, 26 July 2025
Support It's easier to find good c: photos using Google search than its own search. On-wiki add-image search seems even worse: it cannot find images even when the full file name is given. Ponor (talk) 19:53, 26 July 2025
Support Improve on-Commons search is mandatory. Wikidata-driven categories translation can be a step, but also more userfriendly filters (bw-gray-clipart-16M color, or raster/vector) can be very useful (and perhaps not hard to implement) for this goal. We have a huge archive, but very tiny instruments for playing. -- TrameOscure (talk) 13:11, 27 July 2025
Support GiovanniPen (talk) 15:10, 10 August 2025