Suggest-then-add videos & other media set in Wikidata items to their Wikipedia articles (Community Wishlist/W394)

Description

Many items on Wikidata have a video, audio, or image set while the corresponding Wikipedia articles don't have any media or include only less representative/useful ones.

There are many reasons why contributors may only add files to Wikidata items – for example it's much easier and quicker to add these there instead of editing Wikipedia articles where the file needs a caption and good placement location or because there are hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia and it would feel excessive and be extremely time-intensive to add the file to them (or many of them). If there's a new useful illustrative file on Commons and it gets added to a Wikidata item assuming it takes ~2 minutes to open an article, select an appropriate place, machine translate the caption, and insert the image into the article, it would take 10 hours to add just one file to the articles of all the Wikipedias if most of them have an article on the subject.

This proposal relates to media set in the following WD properties: video, schematic, film poster, image, audio, locator map, detail map. There may be several further ones here to consider. It would only suggest the media if it's not yet included in the article.

Currently, not even high-quality files that have been featured of Wikimedia Commons' frontpage as 'Media of the Day' get added to any of the relevant Wikipedia articles, let alone many or all of them. A few examples: this video would be useful somewhere in Melbourne tram route 96, this in Hakkaisan Ropeway, this in Medical ultrasound (added it there by now), this in Pika etc etc. Another example type are videos of films in articles about the film. Also for articles like list of countries by cereal production (Q1328451) the data graphic image set on such items is very useful.

I propose that if a Wikidata item has a media file set that is missing in the Wikipedia article, adding that media is suggested to users on the article's talk page. Suggestions would only be shown for media files after they stayed in the item for some while (e.g. one month) to prevent problematic/inappropriate files that get removed on Wikidata relatively quickly to be suggested.

However, with just suggesting media but not doing anything further if nobody acts on these suggestions I see two issues:

there's many language version Wikipedias, some of them are really small with few active contributors
even for the largest ones there's probably not enough volunteers doing these tasks for things to be added at scale (in addition it would be a large timesink)

Partly due to that I think just suggesting is not enough: a bot, which could also be coded by volunteers, could add them to the article after some duration. So it's proposed that a process is built consisting of:

Automatic creation of Talk page posts suggesting the media to be added (they would need to get marked as solved once done) with info on the next step.
Automatic addition of the media via some bot (or script/tool) if nobody responded to/declined the Talk page post. (This would be especially useful for smaller-language Wikipedias.)

Having more media in articles would make Wikipedia more interesting and engaging as well as more informative. There also is this goal We will innovate in different content formats, develop new software functionalities for Wikimedia projects, […] and to deliver knowledge as a service for all. Note that newcomer tasks / Suggested Tasks and things like that don't suggest video from Wikidata for example and don't auto add them and are therefore not feasible given the high number of items with files especially for smaller wikis. Reviewing suggestions – which would have a sufficiently long wait period and which could simply be revered if people didn't notice – could be part of personalized tasks / a tasks wizard as suggested in this wish.

This is already implemented to some extent on some smaller Wikipedias which integrate media set in the Wikidata item in the infobox template (e.g. see ast:Ultrasoníu). However, these:

only integrate one media file even if multiple are set on the property
show the media file directly instead of giving it a little time so Wikidata and/or Wikipedia editors can check whether it's useful and it doesn't seem to consider language qualifiers and is not feasible to be done at scale across the many infobox templates across the many Wikipedias
only integrate the media if an infobox is set but these are not set on most articles
seem to only be used in several smaller Wikipedias and even there only in a few templates

Note that people have put lots of work into adding very-relevant media files to Wikidata items but it's nearly useless so far (except that these files are shown in the Wikidata infobox of Commons categories) and this proposal make all that very useful and substantially improve also the smaller Wikipedias.

Challenges

When a file gets declined in one or especially more Wikipedias, the suggestion may be best held back for some time and then suggested in a special way (e.g. not auto-adding the file)
Probably most videos in Wikidata have a language qualifier set by now but many don't so it may be best to not suggest these where people would first need to set the underused no linguistic content (Q22282939) qualifier for videos in which there is no substantial audio language
Proper location in the article and caption could be optimized; it may be best to just add somewhere near the top but not at the top and without a caption.
When a media file has language of work or name set as a qualifier in Wikidata (or on the item overall), then it would only be suggested to the language version matching that language (or if the language is widely understood in the Wikipedia's regions like English is in German-language regions and no version matching the language is set on the item as well). Here I think some files, mainly those that have the qualifier 'full video' or those that have subtitles, should still be suggested to be added even if there is a language mismatch – for example Amazing Mr. X (1948) should also be suggested to be added to w:it:The Amazing Mr. X. Note that many smaller language Wikipedias' articles often are very outdated and are barely added to and thus often miss useful media even if such is set in ENWP from where the media could theoretically be synced if it contains the same article section.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request