Talk:Community Wishlist/W303

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Related wish

Related wish: Community Wishlist/Wishes/(Commons) file description pages should be indexable by (Google) search (this has an unclear title, is not about DuckDuckGo, does not have concrete suggestions, and appears to assume without investigations that this can't be an issue of semi-censorship where the problem is not of technical nature)

I do not believe this criticism of another ticket (authored by User:TheDJ, who does not yet appear to have been informed) to be appropriate, nor valid. The title is appropriate and is an achievable outcome. Mentioning DDG is not necessary; the issue and potential solution apply to and affect all search engines equally. And it clearly identifies technical deficiencies ("content of the metadata on the file description page is not discoverable", "pages have a file extension in the end of the path"), which can be addressed by technical solutions, as discussed in that wish's linked Phbricator ticket. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:13, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It is not criticism at all. I was clarifying why it's not the same and I wonder why you take it as a criticism but I have no problem with removing it in case it appears like so to users and/or if you see a problem with that. However, it looks you didn't read the full thing: the other proposal also assumes the technical issue is the problem and that despite of Google being a pretty large resourceful entity where one can assume that the search engine does not fail merely because a nonfile url ends in .jpg. Mentioning DGG may not be necessary but I choose to do so while the other proposal chose to only mention Google while ignoring all the other search engines. Also I informed TheDJ weeks in advance at the talk page of the other issue. You make it seem like I was hiding this proposal from him, thanks for pinging him. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:44, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I admit I missed that talk page discussion, but it is hardly clear about your intention to make this wish. I also don't think phrases such as "unclear title", "does not have concrete suggestions", and "appears to assume without investigations" can be taken as anything but criticism. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:53, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Well criticism is not a bad thing or forbidden. I pointed out the points there earlier after which the wish could have been edited. I don't have a problem with removing that part but I wonder whether people will then be confused. Removing it for now. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:06, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

Hello @Pigsonthewing, thank you for sharing a problem with the Community Wishlist. We will get back to you with further questions if need be. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 14:03, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Focus area?

@JWheeler-WMF: Could you add this to the focus area Improved discovery of media files? It's linked from there so shouldn't it be in that focus area? That this wish is also about DuckDuckGo and Bing which many millions use is already a large difference between this and the linked related wish which is in that focus area – the main difference is that the other wish assumes to know what the (unlikely) cause of this problem is. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:46, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes - clerical oversight! JWheeler-WMF (talk) 16:42, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

In progress

We have a promising lead on what the problem is here in T54647, so moving this to "in progress"

CParle (WMF) (talk) 13:01, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

Nice to progress on this important issue! An overview ticket has been added to the proposal and in addition to these two there also is

• phab:T397267 (result of phab:T214998#10911867 and as it seems to have been implemented are there any results yet?) and
• phab:T396168 (stalled an the explanation seems to be Per the latest tests reported in the task description, it would seem that Vector navigation alone is enough to disqualify the page from being a watch page. We could have a separate watch page, like File:Video.webm/watch or Special:Watch/Video.webm, but it would need to override the skin to strip out the navigation. what about creating a issue about making the suggested changes / making these changes some time soon?)

Prototyperspective (talk) 14:22, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Per mw:Requests for comment/Mobile domain sunsetting/status#2025-07-25 as notified by a comment on one of the issues: We met with Google Search folks on Thursday (meeting notes), where we learned that T396168 (Google Search not indexing Commons videos in "Videos" search) is likely a bug in Google instead of an issue with our markup, and Google is now looking into it. This is what I meant with "doing something" and "investigating" and not preassuming what the problem(s) is/are – it's great to see this happening now. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:35, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Update:

Indexed page count for Commons in google has risen from 58M to 118M so far, and is still rising. Indexed video count is up by a factor of 1000x

(for more details see task T400022 and task T396168 and linked tickets)

CParle (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

That's great! Do we need to do anything similar with DuckDuckGo, Bing, or any other search engines? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:25, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

That's some big wonderful news! I guess one should be able to see substantial changes in the page views now, I'll probably look for these at a later point, if somebody has any specific charts/tables to look at for this, it would be nice if it was posted here. So far there is the total Commons views where it's difficult to make sense of them and they don't show a very recent clear increase but a mysterious increase starting already in February (the most viewed files list also doesn't show some new sfw videos). I tested it with one video where it did show the Commons video in the video tab. However, that was just one video and the text entered was long and exactly matching the video title (The oldest stars in the Universe – A tour from the Big Bang to the present); more better tests could be a good idea. I guess if videos are getting indexed, then this is mostly done when it comes to videos with any issues probably being things like discoverability in the sense of SEO (e.g. having descriptive file-titles or phrase "free video" somewhere on the page).

If videos and categories are partially indexed with many categories and videos not being indexed then it would be important to find out why the remainder aren't indexed. This could be in part technical and in part Commons community policy-type decisions. For illustration, Google does show c:Category:Sustainable transport when searching for sustainable transport wikimedia commons but not when searching for sustainable transport free media When it comes to images, Google may now actually be better than DuckDuckGo which unlike Google does not show c:File:Share of primary energy from solar, world map, OWID.svg in the Images tab when searching for "Share of primary energy from solar, world map". All of these things may be best put into a separate wish with possibly so much of this wish maybe soon being implemented. Additionally, it would probably be good if something similar was done also for at least DuckDuckGo – for example when searching the above string it does show the video on Commons but only in the Web results, not the Videos tab.

Thanks a lot for looking into this and providing info here! Prototyperspective (talk) 21:01, 21 September 2025 (UTC)