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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Do something about Google & DuckDuckGo search not indexing media files and categories on Commons

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Do something about Google & DuckDuckGo search not indexing media files and categories on Commons Submitted

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Description

It is essentially semi-censorship by Google and harms Internet users, Internet neutrality, the Internet ecosystem, Commons contributors, free media, and Wikimedia Commons.

  • Videos on Wikimedia Commons are not showing in the video tab of Google and DuckDuckGo & Co even when searching for their exact title.
  • Most files on Commons are not showing in the Images tab even when they're high-quality and/or highly relevant and much better than most of the other things and websites the image search shows files of (or vice versa only few to none images of WMC are displayed in searches that show more of them).
  • Most major categories on Commons are not showing in the Web search results (e.g. when searching for free done videos)).
DuckDuckGo Images (wall of images view) also does not show Wikimedia Commons images (instead, lots of strange other files)

I think the bad state of indexing is the most urgent and top-priority issue of Commons, even before getting more developers (volunteers) to help out with code issues and priority technical issues themselves.

-> All the time and effort (lots of it) people spend on meticulously organizing, maintaining, and populating the site doesn't mean much if people don't know about and find the site and the files and category pages on it. I think the movement and WMF owe it to the Commons contributors to make their work not get semi-censored and be available to the world which would also boost the platform via more new users & more contributions & more media.
-> One could make the site as great as you want via technical innovations, features like search-boxes for categories, or by uploading high-quality media but if people don't know about and can't find its files, it's more or less a waste of time and effort.
-> The site has tens of thousands of categories and over 100 million files organized via these categories. It is the largest repository of free media and the second largest Wikimedia project. Wikipedia is about text but a media file can say thousands of words and audiovisual media are currently the most-consumed media formats in the world, consumed much more than Wikipedia is visited. It has many different applications and is useful not just because Wikipedians can find media to embed in articles there.

The concrete suggestions of this proposals are that something is done about it in the very near future by the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community/ies:

  1. WMF investigating why this is occurring and gather any relevant information such as evidence of this, a dataset of examples of indexed and nonindexed files which could then be published in some blog-post (a systematic dataset; see also some examples in this VP thread)
  2. WMF asking Google about why WMC is in large part not indexed in written form and this doesn't even seem to be some SEO-type issue or downranking, most files seem to not be indexed at all including all(?) videos
  3. An open letter signed by Wikimedia community asking Google, DDG (& Co?) to change this – an open letter could build momentum, clarify this problem, maybe get some attention of digital policymakers and the news media, as well as get the community to work on solving this
  • Common misconceptions: 1. this isn't about Google & Co not indexing any pages on WMC (it's well known some WMC pages are findable albeit I have yet to see any video on Commons in their Videos tab) 2. this may not be all the fault of Google&Co algorithms but to some degree also due to missing indexing-related adjustments on the Wikimedia side 3. this isn't about actions before systematic investigations of this issue have been done – step one is key and the prerequisite for subsequent actions

Related wish: (Commons) file description pages should be indexable by (Google) search

Assigned focus area

Improved discovery of media files

Type of wish

System change

Wikimedia Commons

Affected users

all Web users, Commons contributors, free media ecosystem/users

Other details

  • Created: 15:38, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 16:43, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Prototyperspective (talk)