Exciting! Wikimedia Foundation Receives $3 Million Sloan Foundation Grant to Enable Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons

From the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation, with a US$3,015,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is leading an effort to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest repository of freely licensed educational media.
[ Clip]
Wikimedia Commons includes more than 35 million freely licensed media files—photos, audio, and video—ranging from stunning photos of geographic landscapes to donations from institutions with substantial media collections, like the Smithsonian, NASA, and the British Library. Like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has become a “go-to” source on the internet—used by everyone from casual browsers to major media outlets to educational institutions, and easily discoverable through search engines. It continues to rapidly grow every year: Volunteer contributors added roughly six million new files in 2016.
[Clip]
Over three years, the Wikimedia Foundation will develop infrastructure, tools, and community support to enable the work of contributors, who have long requested a way to add more precise, multilingual and reusable data to media files.
This will support new uses of Commons’ media, from richer and more dynamic illustration of articles on Wikipedia, to helping new users, like museums, remix the media in their own applications. Structured data will also be compatible with and support Wikimedia Commons’ partnership communities, including “GLAM” institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) that have donated thousands of images in recent years. With the introduction of structured data on Commons, GLAM institutions will be able to more easily upload media and integrate existing metadata into Wikimedia Commons and share their collections with the rest of the web.

Read the Complete Blog Post

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users