Structured Data on Commons/Newsletter/2014-11-01

The Structured Data Bee, vol. 1, issue 1

Greetings, thank you for signing up for the Structured Data newsletter and its first edition. With this newsletter, the Structured data team plans on keeping you informed of technical progress, events, and communications to talk about the project, and continued information on how you can participate. This newsletter will be sent approximately every two weeks, and future editions will be translatable prior to publication. If you're new to Wikidata and want more information about how it works in relation to Wikimedia Commons, you can read an introduction to Wikidata for Commons being drafted.

Tech and design

• The software development for this process is still in the planning phases. The idea is to have some functional prototyping done for experimentation and feedback by the end of the year.
• The initial roadmap for development has been posted on Commons. The roadmap is a rough outline and is open to iterations as the team learns where and when to focus its energies.
• There is a page set up for design ideas about what structured data could potentially look like.
• There are forthcoming requests for comment about the particulars of technical architecture on mediawiki.org. Keep an eye on the c:Commons:Structured data/Get involved page for notification of when the RfCs are posted.

Events and chats

• There was a week-long meeting between the Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team, the Wikidata team, and community members, held in Berlin, Germany, at the office of Wikimedia Deutchland on October 6-10. You can read an overview of the event in on this page on Commons. There are also plenty of pictures available on Wikimedia Commons.

• If you would like to read more detail about what was discussed, there are etherpads of notes taken for each day of the event.

• The next IRC office hour to discuss the structured data project will be held on November 20, from 19:30 to 20:30 UTC.

• The second IRC office hour (logs) was held on October 16, and the first (logs) on September 3.

Getting involved

• You've signed up for the newsletter. That's a great first step!
• While working prototypes are being developed, there is a drive to make all files contain machine-readable data on Wikimedia projects.

• The information and sign-up page is located on Meta, at File metadata cleanup drive.
• The MrMetadata tool on labs that will identify files on your wiki(s) that need information templates added.

• A hub has been launched to facilitate communication and documentation for this work.

• There is a frequently-asked questions page that is finishing drafting and will need translated. Keep an eye out for when it is ready if you are interested in translating.
• There will be active organization of the Get involved page as community participation is further organized. There will be work groups, similar to specific Wikiprojects, dedicated to particular aspects of structured data like licensing presentation, design, API performance, and even helping out with this newsletter and other community communications.

There will be much more information and activities around the proposal to develop structured data on Wikimedia Commons. This project is a major undertaking and an important step as the chief provider, repository, and curator of media for Wikimedia projects.

Thank you for your participation in such an extensive project, let me know if you're interested in participating in this newsletter. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 04:43, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!