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Wikibase Request for Comment: Wikibase Suite full multimedia proof of concept configuration
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Description

Goal

The final goal is to help the WBS development team providing a configuration of Wikibase Suite with as much extras as possible, to mimic the user experience in Wikidata.

Context

  • Today is easier than ever to set up your WBS instance. The Deploy distribution packages an awesome amount of complexity in a very simple task for a not very experienced system administrator.
  • The bad news is its configuration in the current form is «naked» and it not includes many mature and well know Mediawiki extensions available, reducing the product value.
  • In the last release there is an approach to add extensions at the docker-compose level. The bad part is many of the most interesting extensions needs modifications at the Dockerfile level and, worst, they need experienced MediaWiki integrators/administrators/developers to properly configure them.
  • The output of T391821 is expected to help this task.
  • Why choose a multimedia configuration? Because it's an excelent demonstrator of the power of the MediaWiki plaform. Also, there is a practical need for it (see VSG).
  • Finally, we don't target wb.cloud because their operative has stronger requirements but hopefuly some results could be suitable for it, after the product managers evaluation.

First draft

Sadly, I don't have a practical draft to share but an amount of notes and failed experiments :-)

Event Timeline

Grateful for this initiative @Olea, and thank you for putting it forward! I will be at the Hackathon to discuss and maybe contribute to this effort.

Indeed within the Wikibase Suite team the question of which additional extensions to possibly include by default is a currently a hot topic, and setting the target to mimic'ing the Wikidata UX seems is a good idea for evaluation.

In terms of the rest of the particulars of this proposal I have two questions:

  1. What is meant by a "multimedia configuration" of MediaWiki?
  2. Do we have 1-3 examples of extensions that might require modification to the WBS Wikibase (MediaWiki) Dockerfile / rebuilding of the WBS Wikibase Docker image to install? Specific examples of this would be really helpful to us as a team to understand the issue and needs better.

@lojo_wmde thanks for your interest.

At the hackathon we are organizing a «Wikibase Zone» and I hope we all meet there. Also I set-up an small briefing meeting and we have a ad-hoc Telegram WB group. Please share with your team.

What is meant by a "multimedia configuration" of MediaWiki?

Good question and I'm not still sure because I couldn't find the time to setup a working prototype. There are a lot more of mediawiki stuff I'm not familiar than I expected. My definition would be: a full Wikibase installation able to host multimedia (as in Commons) and tag the multimedia resources as in Structured Data on Commons.

I'm not expecting a full experience like in Commons, but just a minimal viable product. Our goal (at my job) is to implement a subset of the CIDOC-CRM and PREMIS ontologies taking benefit of this configuration.

Do we have 1-3 examples of extensions that might require modification to the WBS Wikibase (MediaWiki) Dockerfile [...]?

Here it is the list of the extensions I think are needed and the system dependencies, when there are. IIRC all the dependencies are packaged in Ubuntu except 3d2png.

Multimedia Mediawiki extensions and related OS dependencies:

extensionrationalesystem dependencies
Extension:3DProvides support for 3D file formats3d2png xvfb
Extension:PdfHandlerDriver for viewing PDF files in image mode.ghostscript imagemagick xpdf-utils
Extension:PagedTiffHandlerDriver for viewing TIFF files in image modeexiv2 libtiff-tools
Extension:TimedMediaHandlerSynchronized audio, video, and text controller, supporting WebM, Ogg Theora, Vorbis, and SRT formatsffmpeg
Extension:VipsScalerThe VipsScaler extension creates JPG and PNG thumbnails faster and at low memory usage.libvips-tools
Extension:WikibaseMediaInfoadding a MediaInfo entity for handling structured data about multimedia files.n/a
Extension:Wikibase Local MediaAdds support for local media files to Wikibase via a dedicated data typen/a
Extension:UploadWizardmultimedia upload assistant <br>(not really sure if it can be used outside Commons)n/a
Extension:QuickInstantCommonsAllows using images from Wikimedia Commons in a high performance wayn/a
Extension:PageImagesCollects information about images used on page (for thumbnails)n/a
Extension:NativeSvgHandlerServes SVG images directly to clientsn/a
Extension:MultimediaViewerExpand thumbnails in a larger size in a fullscreen interfacen/a
Extension:MediaSearchMedia-focused way to display search results through the media search page.n/a
Extension:GeoDataAdds the functionality of storing and retrieving geographic coordinatesn/a
KartographerAllows maps to be added to the wiki pagesn/a

At the hackathon I hope to find more experienced Mediawiki administrators/developers to fix the list and to help to pre-configure each one, which usually doesn't look a trivial task.

Citing Deepesha Burse:

«Hey everyone! As @IsmaelOlea mentioned, we would like to discuss which Wikibase Extensions to package with deploy tomorrow at 11 am. If you already have a list of Extensions you would like to include by default with deploy, you can add the list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f10pddV_3VOIkXcpGaoSbLvb33F9-pusk7xKr3ITCT4/

So, we didn't could set up a «multimedia pilot» but now we have at the said google spreadsheet a more detailed list of related extensions and we found Wikibase Suite is including so many available but not activated. Now have a more clear escenario to the next step.

Leif_WMDE triaged this task as Medium priority.Jun 10 2025, 3:13 PM

Just for the record: this task is a work in progress.

Feel free to add more value added extensions (and user scripts).

Happy to say the most of the OS dependencies for multimedia Mediawiki extensions would be soon included in WBS Deploy (see).