Talk:Wikimedia Futures Lab/Dashboard/Experiment Tracker/A Media Face for Commons

Frontpage showcasing vs other ways to address this

I think you point out sth important and correct at Wikimedia Commons currently functions as a back-end database optimized for experienced editors, rather than a front-facing multimedia ecosystem for the global public.

However, I don't know whether the frontpage of Commons is the right place for this.

I think instead it would be great if Commons media was embedded somehow in Wikipedia articles (desktop and app). mw:Readers/Reader Growth/WE3.1.3 Image_Browsing relates to that.

There's many reasons for that and they include that Wikipedia has a far larger audience than Commons and simply embedding media files directly on the Main page wouldn't increase them substantially. Additionally, such could drown the useful links on that page which are often just 1 or 2 clicks to places close to the way you describe them. It would be further helped by a) improving how Commons categories display on mobile and b) modern wall of images view for categories. Moreover, including content on the frontpage seems rather unlikely to be very interesting to the particular user, e.g. because interests are pretty different (this would be different if the user can e.g. favorite specific categories – one can already fave them in the app – and topics and then get interesting quality content that relate to these displayed).

Additionally, what could help is if the Commons app enabled playing audios & videos & had a proper interesting Explore feed and Commons video+audio was integrated into the popular NewPipe app. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:14, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback @Prototyperspective!

• We seem to agree that for multimedia and visual content, a "proper interesting Explore feed" is key. All modern multimedia systems recognize this for engagement and retention, whether it's IG, Tiktok, Youtube shorts, Apple Music, Spotify, or any non-text content, you need reliable ways to delight the eyes/ears. This secret sauce of serendipitous discovery is needed when there is an overwhelming amounts of content. The only other proven successful mode we've seen is via the search box. Yahoo! learned this the hard way, which is why catalog and directories of that type are rarely seen as an effective main interface to content.
• And that's what I fear: is our gray wall of text-oriented categories a relic of a bygone era (that honestly, was never that great to begin with)?
• You mentioned that re-configuring the front page: "could drown the useful links on that page which are often just 1 or 2 clicks to places close to the way you describe them". But are they really "useful?" Do we have the data to back that up? For myself, I know I have never relied on any of those pages or category pages, mainly because I never know if I'm going to be clicking 2, 3, 5, or 10+ levels deep into a category tree I don't really understand.
• Idea: Creating an "interesting Explore feed" could be public challenge for the upcoming Wikimania Hackathon. They are promoting an online component, so this could be a way to engage a wider set of folks for solutions.wikimania:2026:Hackathon#Program_and_schedule

- Fuzheado (talk) 14:38, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Indeed! is our gray wall of text-oriented categories a relic of a bygone era well first of all it makes little sense to abolish sth without a good replacement. A gallery of random unpersonalized content-type-biased featured pictures for example is not a good replacement to categories. Additionally, a) both things can be on the frontpage – it's not one or the other and b) what's described/envisioned could be overhauls or new parts or new features of category pages.

But are they really "useful?" yes. They largely have space-(top)sorted subcategories that enable navigating to the subtopic / subcategory of relevance/interest and they enable browsing around to see what Commons has. They are useful in many ways and they can be surfaced in many ways. For example, MOTD sometimes has an interesting category with good-quality contents linked in the file description. The Commons app enables bookmarking categories so one can easily return to or check new uploads or browse these categories. One could also think about new things such as Recommended Reading List-like suggestions of categories to browse. Also note that with "proper interesting" earlier this was also referring to some kind of personalization eg via the user being able to select some topics of interest. On reddit, lots of users browse a lot of media files that are organized via subreddits. On Commons, files are organized similarly via categories but one doesn't have a frontpage with files from categories one is interested in such as c:Category:Microscopic images, which is similar to /r/MicroPorn or data graphics which is similar to /r/dataisbeautiful and there is not much interaction etc. I don't think ideas here have been developed meaningfully far; these are some inputs and ideas for getting things further. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:05, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Can I help with this?

Hey, @Fuzheado, @TheDJ... can I help with this? Theklan (talk) 12:39, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Definitely! We welcome more voices and views. - Fuzheado (talk) 13:51, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Media face for Categories

@Fuzheado During NWE hackathon, I experimented a bit with applying the same concept to Categories. I created a demo of this which can be seen on YouTube but using this url youtu.be/MkC7_HTIYhA (it's an unlisted video). The attendees really liked these ideas, which is a nice validation. I hope to make this into an actual user script, so that we can do more with this as an experiment. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:24, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Example screenshot of Commons Vibe tool

This is great, and glad to see things are moving forward. I heard many positive reviews about your demo from the hackathon.

This is my "Commons Vibe" browser experiment I've been working on, off-wiki, as a standalone tool. Some examples of how to use it:

• Show a lazy loading, scrolling set of images from a category - Good at having an infinite scroll "feed" of a category
• Show all POTY 2024 in random shuffle order - For large categories, sometimes folks want a "taste" or random sampling of what's there, rather than always seeing the first page of content from an A-Z listing.
• Show all featured media, with video previews - Provide a quick way to scan lots of video content, taking some inspiration from iMovie that plays videos when you mouseover the thumbnail

Some other ideas for future work:

• Viewing multiple categories or filter by structured data, as a result of using CirrusSearch directives, such as "haswbstatement"
• Accept a SPARQL query to WCQS to produce a list of files
• Accept any output from Petscan to display things visually - file list, PagePile ID, etc.
• Create a breadcrumb trail to allow meaningful backtracking
• List all subcategories of the current category to navigate into

Ideas welcome. - Fuzheado (talk) 13:06, 5 April 2026 (UTC)