Structured Data Across Wikimedia A project to structure content on wikitext pages in a way that will be machine-recognizable and -relatable, to make reading, editing, and searching easier and more accessible across projects and on the Internet.
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SDAW[1] was a project designed to help structure content on wikitext pages in a way that will be machine-recognizable and -relatable, to make reading, editing, and searching easier and more accessible across projects and on the Internet.
It aimed to help users associate contents between Wikimedia projects, help readers dive deeper in the Wikimedia knowledge ecosystem, and help contributors disseminate information across projects and beyond them in a Wikidata-like way. The project was created to provide a venue for experimentation with computer-aided editing tools to make editing easier and more accessible to more editors around the world.
The project ran from February 1, 2021 to June 30, 2023.
This project was a follow-up to similar development that was completed on Commons, as part of the previousSDC[2] grant, and has been partially funded by a three year grant from the Sloan Foundation.Work on SDC made us aware of the need for more advanced metadata for all content and APIs to provide better search results, which would make in turn content more accessible, discoverable, translatable and usable for other needs.
The project had three high level goals:
The goal of the project is to design and prototype a new system that aims to be flexible enough to serve all the kinds of metadata we might need to support in the near future.
We identified three main projects that we will develop, as part of our work:
The Image Suggestion UI aims at developing systems for structured data across all Wikimedia projects.
This work will build on the work already begun as part of the“Add an image” structured task project.However, its focus will be shifted towards improving the processes for experienced contributors.In particular, we will target users who have edited or watched a particular article or set of articles, since they are likely to be experts in the topic and to have interest in seeing that article(s) improve.
The Section Topics project will identify sections in an article and create topics accordingly for those sections, drawing on several elements, such as:
One of the first use cases we envisioned for section topics will besection-level image suggestions, which will use the blue-links algorithm and section identification infrastructure above, and be delivered both via the newcomer experience and via notifications for experienced contributors.This will build upon thework done on image suggestions and will be developed in partnership with the Structured Data, Data Platform, Research, Search, Android, and Growth teams.
These elements will not change, nor impact the current editing experience for users.All these activities will be automatic and will not depend on any action from editors.Currently, this project is in its development phase, and there are still aspects that may require further investigation and/or feedback from users.
The Search Improvements project will use structured content to give users a more inviting and more efficient way to search and find content on the Wikipedias.By improvingSpecial:Search, we want to enable users to find the information they are looking for, or that they may not have noticed, or previously come across through existing search.
We aim to identify and define incremental “special search” improvements that use structured content, to assist users in finding the content they are looking for, especially in those language wikis that have fewer articles.
Project feedback is and will always be welcome.We are especially interested in your ideas about the extent to which you want to keep the “human-in-the-loop” throughout the topical metadata creation process.We are looking forward to hearing from you about the following open questions:
Also, more specific feedback about related projects can generally be left on the projects' talk pages:
Partial funding for this work is provided by afollow-up restricted grant from theAlfred P. Sloan Foundation, to further the work done by the first round of funding to developSDC[2].