Our bug tracker has already a pretty rich and long history of tickets requesting a machine readable API to retrieve files metadata on Mediawiki in general and with Commons in particular. This one seems to be the last one and, from a technical point of view, the most promising one.

I think I don't ignore the complexity of its implementation but I'm a little bit surprised that this is considered as a "low priority" and to not see more activity on this although "structured data" is probably the most important move currently running on Commons.

We have free content, but our solution simply does not allow Commons re-using on an industrial scale. For example, at Kiwix, we spread millions of ZIM files which simply don't respect the free licenses (by not correctly attributing the pictures with corresponding license/author).

That's why I want to ask what is the status/timeline on this and why this ticket does not have the highest priority?

In T585#1140140, @Kelson wrote:

I'm a little bit surprised that this is considered as a "low priority"

That's just because of WMF being busy with other things https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2015-February/001019.html

I think so far most work has been done by volunteers, as usual, and nothing prevents that from continuing. The best way to get things going is usually to isolate specific use cases and solutions in individual reports (there are many), fleshing out the respective descriptions, so that devs find ideas "ready to implement" and don't have to navigate a massive swamp of discussions to get a small thing done.

Any news on this? (CC @atgo)

@Kelson I suppose this has been obsoleted by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data. Or maybe the plan is to pick it up again once that project has progressed a bit.

@Ramsey-WMF @Abit will this be resolved as part of SDoC?

The Multimedia team is working on the MediaInfo API in Q2. It will deliver structured metadata for media on Commons.

@Ramsey-WMF, @MarkTraceur, when you are creating your API task, maybe y'all want to integrate or close this one?

Thanks for the heads-up, Atgo.

@daniel Thx, any clue about a specific task on Phabricator? Commons:Structured_data is a promising project but seems to be quite big and running already for quite a long time. It seems difficult to me to know (be informed) at which time the feature I need will be/has been implemented?

@Kelson I can only refer you to @Ramsey-WMF and @MarkTraceur

In T585#4608314, @Kelson wrote:

@daniel Thx, any clue about a specific task on Phabricator? Commons:Structured_data is a promising project but seems to be quite big and running already for quite a long time. It seems difficult to me to know (be informed) at which time the feature I need will be/has been implemented?

Hi @Kelson

Which aspect are you referring to when you say "the feature I need"?

The Structured Data project is indeed large and has a release schedule spread out over the next 14 months. If we can know specifically what you're looking for I can give you a better answer.

FWIW it's not too hard to create your own high-level API on Toolforge (once Commons supports enough structured data) and it would probably provide useful feedback for the developers (much like WDQ did for WDQS).

@Ramesh2744 Given a title (multimedia file) retrieve author/license (ideally title/description with corresponding language if available) in a machine readable format.

@Ramsey-WMF

In T585#4613413, @Kelson wrote:

Given a title (multimedia file) retrieve author/license (ideally title/description with corresponding language if available) in a machine readable format.

This functionality should be available early next year, however, the exact structure of the structured license data is up to the community to decide. It's a process that has already started (you can see discussions here) but may take some time to finalize.

In T585#4613413, @Kelson wrote:

@Ramesh2744 Given a title (multimedia file) retrieve author/license (ideally title/description with corresponding language if available) in a machine readable format.

@Ramesh2744 Thank you very much for the information.

@Ramsey-WMF Hi, what is the status on this? I kind of believe the work has made progresses... but this is tracked in an other ticket!?

The Structured Data on Commons project uses the wikibase http API to manipulate structured image data, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/API

Specifically, the api calls we use are wbgetentities for reading structured data, and wbsetlabel, wbsetclaim and wbremoveclaims for writing

We don't have a code-level API for querying structured data beyond what exists in Wikibase, and creating one is not on the roadmap for the structured data team

@Cparle Thank you for the feedback.

This has not been resolved. Declined, maybe?