• @matthiasmullie pointed out we could use the Commons MediaSearch API as an alternative to the data gateway . Quoting from T400823#11074882:

These are available from the image suggestions internal API endpoint and are also written to the image page's Elastic document under weighted_tags (as image.linked.from.wikipedia.lead_image/*) & searchable through the custommatch:depicts_or_linked_from=<entity id> keyword

• @egardner suggested to consider T395713: REST: Beta Modules - support beta suffix in module ids and versions instead of an Action API endpoint with an @experimental tag

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=search&gsrsearch=custommatch:depicts_or_linked_from=Q146&gsrnamespace=6&gsrlimit=10&prop=entityterms|globalusage&wbetterms=label&wbetlanguage=fr&gunamespace=0&gulimit=500&gufilterlocal=1

Above is an example where we can already get all data we need through existing resources.
In this example:

• 10 (gsrlimit=10) images (gsrnamespace=6) for "cat" (gsrsearch=custommatch:depicts_or_linked_from=Q146
• with the French (wbetlanguage=fr) label (prop=entityterms & wbetterms=label)
• and the main-namespace articles (gunamespace=0) they're used in (prop=globalusage)

Things to be aware of:

• this is limited to 500 other-wiki-usage links overall; if result #1 already exceeds 500, the rest will no longer have that information; in such rare cases, more calls might be needed
• this will may include files that are already on the page & should be filtered out
• it may also include files used on other pages on the same wiki (e.g. for articles that cover pretty much the same subject), where we might also want to filter them out to avoid confusion
• it may also include results that are not used in other wikis (custommatch:depicts_or_linked_from also does files with depicts statements); these will usually rank lower than other results, though (and it wouldn't be too much work to put up another keyword where they're eliminated) but I'd suggest to just filter them out client-side for now

Assessment of APIs outputs

We manually checked 9 random articles from the top 100 views on English Wikipedia, August 2025.
The table below shows the number of images output by the 2 candidate APIs:

Observations

• All checked articles have images, so it's not surprising that the Data Gateway has no results. Article-level suggestions only cater for unillustrated articles, and section-level ones aren't many and generally impact smaller articles
• we filtered images available in the article and empty globalusage from MediaSearch results
• sometimes MediaSearch offers additional images from equivalent articles in other languages
• MediaSearch requirements:
  • article's Wikidata entity ID. mw.config.get( 'wgWikibaseItemId' ) can be used to look it up. It's not guaranteed that every article has one, although we expect the coverage to be high
  • filter out non-images - example
  • filter out images from other articles in other languages - example: Google > File:Consultants GAFAM EN.png from GAFAM in frwiki
  • keep images from equivalent articles in other languages - example: Google > File:Googleplex-Patio-Aug-2014.JPG from cawiki

Conclusion

• The main (anecdotal) conclusion is that the APIs don't differ much when looking at popular articles
• however, MediaSearch might have some more relevant images from equivalent articles, which looks like the deal breaker
• this comes at the cost of heavy data cleaning
• a perfect string match on page titles from other wikis sounds like the quickest way to filter out unwanted results, at the cost of losing relevant ones from titles in different scripts

Decision

Use MediaSearch.

Change #1190684 had a related patch set uploaded (by Matthias Mullie; author: Matthias Mullie):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add MediaSearch custommatch:linked_from keyword

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1190684

Moving to signoff, as the remaining AC are being addressed in T402966: Image Browsing: Create the UI for "images from other wikis".

Change #1190684 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add MediaSearch custommatch:linked_from keyword

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1190684

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-09-24T07:18:32Z] <mlitn@deploy1003> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1190684|Add MediaSearch custommatch:linked_from keyword (T403613)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-09-24T07:25:49Z] <mlitn@deploy1003> mlitn: Backport for [[gerrit:1190684|Add MediaSearch custommatch:linked_from keyword (T403613)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-09-24T07:31:37Z] <mlitn@deploy1003> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1190684|Add MediaSearch custommatch:linked_from keyword (T403613)]] (duration: 13m 04s)