🖼️Wikimedia Commons (images)

Mass uploads

In 2016, I did a mass upload of Charles Savage images from our collection. We added images from the upload to categories that they belonged in, and put them on Wikipedia articles where it made sense to do so. Mass uploads are still one of the things that cultural professions are encouraged to do, and the Digital Public Library of America has worked with many institutions to upload millions of images from their partners. However, as an individual looking for the highest-impact actions, I don't think mass uploads are the best way to add value to Wikipedia. Most of the images we uploaded aren't currently being used on a Wikipedia page in any language. The ones that people are actually seeing are (mostly) the ones we added to Wikipedia pages.

Structured data

Structured data on Commons became a really hot topic in the 2020s. You may have noticed that search on Wikipedia Commons often relies on file names or written descriptions. Structured data allows you to tag an image as containing certain things or people, which in turn helps to improve search results. However, the way the search of structured data was implemented made it so that it wasn't as user-friendly as many cultural professionals hoped (you must be logged in to query the structured data). I didn't do massive edits, but I did experiment with adding some structured data to a map of Northwest fur country (now Utah) and individual buildings in an old photo of Pocatello (click on the "structured data" tab to see what I added).