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Add support for Wikimedia Commons in the open source NewPipe media player app Archived

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Description

Wikimedia Commons integrated into open source media player app NewPipe (proposal)

Wikimedia Commons as of June 2025 has over 350 000 free-licensed videos, all integrated into one system in which those are well organized via categories of all kinds.

Many users have spent a lot of effort to find, upload, and categorize all of these videos. However, that large value is not harnessed – there is lots of untapped potential here for the 2nd largest Wikimedia project. Videos on the site rarely found or watched. Basically, more or less only videos that are included in Wikipedia articles are being watched by readers of the specific article and videos featured on the Commons frontpage for one day as 'Media of the Day'. This is partly because

  1. Videos on Commons are not indexed by Web search engines like especially Google in their 'Videos' tab and category pages that contain these mostly neither.
  2. The Commons app can't play audio and video files which is what the app, which is made by volunteers, would be most useful for (aside from uploading for users who don't have a desktop PC) – note that very very few people worldwide have that app installed and it's unlikely that will change any time soon even if it does play videos.
  3. Instead of making Commons discoverable, on Wikipedia mere small links to category pages are usually buried in the "External links" section underneath the large References section where few people look if they are present at all. There is no panel of files on Commons underneath an article, or a visible category link in the fullscreen-view of media files, and even when opening files in a new tab, it doesn't take the user to Commons but some intermediary page...without the categories. Basically, Commons is kept down, far from its potential, to a large degree by ourselves.

Now, the open source app NewPipe is one of the most popular open source Android apps and can play videos from YouTube and music from SoundCloud. It's very useful since it has various features the official apps don't have such as playing music videos in the background when the screen is locked. This means many people already have that app installed. I think NewPipe + Commons is a match made in heaven!

In the left sidebar of the app, at the top one can select the platform to watch/listen/search files. Currently, those are YouTube, SoundCloud, media.ccc.de, FramaTube (a PeerTube instance), and BandCamp. (By the way, it's also quite useful already to have unified these platforms in one common sleek app.)

I propose that Wikimedia Commons is added to the platforms supported by this open source media player app.

Applications / uses

It would be useful for all kinds of purposes. Ultimately, Commons category support would also be added so that one can browse around or search Commons categories and can see/click these in the video descriptions. For example, one can use it to watch short educational / explanatory videos on Commons such as Wikipedia tutorial videos (most of these aren't in any Wikipedia page).

Personally, the main way I'd use it would be for listening to Spoken Wikipedia audios since again the Commons app can't play them and the Wikimedia player is very outdated with e.g. no function to skip back 10 seconds and wouldn't be well-searchable anyway where one can only listen to one specific audio one has come across coincidentally by browsing Wikipedia. Currently, I listen to such audios by searching and downloading them on Commons with the mobile version of the site, which doesn't even show categories, and then moving the files into my podcast player app which has necessary features like resume audio or skip 10 sec back.

Moreover, by giving people who use the NewPipe app the option to use Commons, the site would be made far more popular, used more, contributions to it become more worth the time & more valuable, and we may get more contributors.

Challenges
  • This may cause server-loads to go up; I don't know by how much and what level would become a tangible issue but also using PeerTube could help with that (another possibility would be something like ads but not ads in the strict sense)
NewPipe

An issue in the NewPipe repo already exists: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/issues/609 It doesn't have much detail and has been moved to the much less frequented/known repo about its core library, the NewPipeExtractor. If you have a GitHub account, I suggest you give it a thumbs up. The main NewPipe repo informs "Our docs provide more information on how a new service can be added to the app and to the NewPipe Extractor."

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Feature request

Wikimedia Commons

Affected users

Commons users

Other details

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