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

Example of Wikimedia Commons and the pages associated with the multimedia links, leading the category lists (2026-02)
Wikimedia Commons front page navigation now leads to multimedia galleries (2026-09)
Experiment owner(s) - add your usernames: TheDJ and Fuzheado
Experiment title: A Media Face for Commons
Brief description of experiment:
- Problem: Wikimedia Commons currently functions as a back-end database optimized for experienced editors, rather than a front-facing multimedia ecosystem for the global public. The front page is characterized by "link-density" over "media-richness," featuring only two media elements despite hosting 120 million files. This text-centric listing is a poor entry point for our diverse image, video, and audio collections.
- Proposal: Commons should be where we showcase the breadth and depth of our content by transforming the monochrome front-page into a vibrant visual hub that looks, sounds, and feels like the humanity it represents.
- Insights: In Frankfurt, TheDJ and Fuzheado were able to meet with Marshall Miller (WMF) to go through non-public stats related to the Google SEO for Wikimedia sites, noting that we may not be particularly good at picking up searches that mention "free photos" or "free images." Related to the recent revelation that Wikimedia mobile sites using "m" in the domain may have affected SEO, a good parallel effort might be to audit the front page of Commons to see what elements are (or are not) SEO friendly. There is the possibility that the front page of Commons, which still uses old-fashioned HTML tables for layout and design rather than CSS, is not being scraped correctly to optimize SEO.
- See also (other inspirations from the movement):
  - WikiDocumentaries
  - Commons.gallery
  - Crotos
  - Commons:MyGallery - interactive, filterable listing of user uploads
  - Wiki Loves Monuments
  - Pictures of the Year
Anticipated completion date: TBD
Link to a page where people can follow progress - this can be your own userpage / sandbox:
- A media face for Wikimedia Commons (Google Docs design doc), by TheDJ and Fuzheado
- Redesign Wikimedia Commons (Google Doc Futures Lab section link), master document for Futures Lab
Activities
- Wikimania 2026 - Unpopular Opinions lightning talks - "Making the Wikimedia movement more... media" by Andrew Lih (July 2026) (Slides)
- WikiConference North America 2026 - Next 25 Unconference session by Andrew Lih (September 2026) (Doc)
- WikiConference North America 2026 - Futures Lab meetup (Andrew Lih, Eva Martin, Asaf Bartov) (September 2026) (Presentation)
UPDATE: As of September 26, 2026, a solution has been implemented, thanks to the work of Bawolff

Prototypes

Objectium – a 3D visual file browser on Toolforge, as a prototype ahead of full glTF support in Mediawiki. (by User:The_DJ) https://objectium.toolforge.org/
WikiBento – It started as a simple dashboard to give a usable user interface to the Commons Impact Metrics API. But it turned into a much deeper exploration about Wikimedia content as knowledge modules – "what if" we could compose and link together arbitrary Wikimedia assets, and do useful things with them? Take the lead section of a Wikipedia article, add a video, and a Commons image gallery, and an interactive graph, and a map, and so on. You wouldn't need to adhere to Wikipedia's structures or strict policies about allowing multimedia, or whether interactive elements can be used. Going even further, what if you could click on a button that allows you to select a branch of a story, and give people different narrative experiences, like Apple's Hypercard used to do? (by User:Fuzheado)
- Here's a basic dashboard for The Met Museum: https://wikibento.toolforge.org/?config=https://w.wiki/TT2g
Wikipedia AI Skills - On Github, a set of AI skills you can use with any AI coding agent/harness like Claude Code, OpenAI, Pi agent, Hermes, OpenCode, Gemini, etc. (https://github.com/fuzheado/Wikipedia-AI-Skills)
Sightglass – metrics tool for Commons (by User:SuperHamster) - https://sightglass.toolforge.org/
Commons Vibe – Example of a visually rich, scrollable view of Commons by category: https://commons-vibe.toolforge.org/?cat=Category%3AFeatured_pictures_on_Wikimedia_Commons&sort=alpha&view=det (by User:Fuzheado)
WikiPano – What if our 360 panosphere viewer could have full interactive tour capabilities? (by User:Fuzheado).
- Virtual tours on WikiPano: https://wikipano.toolforge.org/?page=User%3AFuzheado%2FPanellum_Tour
Infobox Image History – Interactively browse Wikipedia article edit history for infobox images to help photographers understand and evaluate how portrait photos have changed over time: https://infobox-image-history.toolforge.org/ (by User:Fuzheado)
WikiPortraits Photo Service – Example of a portal for the WikiPortraits project, to give external parties an easy to access interface for Commons images: https://photos.wikiportraits.org/ (by User:SuperHamster)
Wikitop 100 – Visualize connections among the top 100 most visited English Wikipedia articles for the day (can choose any day in top.hatnote.com)https://wikitop100.toolforge.org - Used AI agentic coding system: Pi agent, Deepseek V4 Flash (very inexpensive, like $0.10 vs 10 dollars). Learnings: For years, I've wanted to visualize the top articles in Wikipedia to see patterns and clusters. I knew I wanted to use D3.js but hate Javascript. I did this in less than two days with agentic AI coding assistance. (by User:Fuzheado)
WikiGraph – Refactor and expand the above (Wiki Ttop 100) visualization to other data sets in the Wikimedia sphere, making it more useful for GLAM Wiki projects, or WikiPortraits. Already refactored here to work on any English Wikipedia article list: https://github.com/fuzheado/wikigraph (by User:Fuzheado)