Commons talk:Structured data

What about new a SDC / Wikidata property to describe a geographical bounding box? I think it would be useful for maps as well as for Digital Orthophotos (DOP) - maybe even allowing a query for media displaying a certain geographical area? Currently, as far as I see, only the {{Map}} template allows to describe the bounding box of the file exactly, using the coordinates of the four rectangle corners as values for the latitude / longitude parameters. For a DOP with Bounding Box data, see, for example, DOP40 - Stadt Erlangen 32645 5496 (Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung).tif. There, I've used both {{Information}} and {{Map}} as file description, while using only the latitude / longitude and warp_status parameters of {{Map}}. At least, it seems to be possible to set and show the coords of the four corners exactly. But sadly, it seems that the Wikimap Warper can't handle TIFF files - thus, setting warp_status to skip is required, and there's currently no way to show the DOP as map "layer", or to make use of the bounding box otherwise. Fl.schmitt (talk) 19:41, 23 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Fl.schmitt: I don't think a single "bounding box" property would work well (there's no good data type for it), but coordinates of northernmost point (P1332) + coordinates of southernmost point (P1333) + coordinates of easternmost point (P1334) + coordinates of westernmost point (P1335) could be used - the property proposal explicitly supports defin[ing] the limits of a map, the constraints allow usage on MediaInfo entities, and there are a handful of existing files using the properties this way, such as File:Geographic map of Balkan Peninsula.svg. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 20:39, 23 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Lucas Werkmeister - I agree that those four properties can be used to describe a map's bounding box. But doing so has a major disadvantage: the semantics isn't clear. For a map or a DOP, you usually can't determine a single "southernmost point", instead you have to choose between hundreds of them. And there's no common practice or guideline how to choose (contrary to the {{Map}} template guidelines for the latitude and longitude parameters). Thus, choosing a "single" southernmost point is arbitrary. This might be ok for humans, but it's a problem for structured data and applications using those data. The Balkan Peninsula Map is a nice example: It uses only three "points" - the coordinates of southernmost point (P1333) is missing, the coordinates of easternmost point (P1334) seems to denote the coordinates of southernmost point (P1333) as well. A human being is able to cope with this, but i think it's hard to handle such data in a SPARQL query. Additionally, in the case of the Balkan Peninsula Map, it seems that coordinates of westernmost point (P1335) and coordinates of northernmost point (P1332) are both set to the same location. If there's no rule to choose the corners as reference for those properties, using a single point is meaningless - no semantics. For rectangular Maps or DOP, even two corners would be sufficient to describe the bounding box. But doing so will trigger the "item-requires-statement constraint" for the two other corners. So, the concept of combining coordinates of northernmost point (P1332) / coordinates of southernmost point (P1333) / coordinates of easternmost point (P1334) / coordinates of westernmost point (P1335) won't work well to describe a geographical bounding box. Fl.schmitt (talk) 20:29, 24 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

Can someone tell me why we are not allowed to use this as a qualifier to location of creation (P1071)--Trade (talk) 12:09, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Trade: That sounds like a case of XY problem to me :) where do you want to use that qualifier, and with which P131 and P1071 values? (My general answer would be that the P131 belongs on Wikidata on the P1071 value, but maybe your context is different.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 12:57, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

I was using the qualifier to show which county and state a photo was taken in. I was just wondering why that is considered inappropriate--Trade (talk) 12:59, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

P1071 should describe the location of creation. If you start using the qualifiers then probably the value you added to P1071 is incomplete / imprecise. If you added a city / administrative division to P1071, the Wikidata item for the city already knows what P131 for it is, and there is no ambiguity here. Ymblanter (talk) 13:09, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

What Ymblanter said. It's not necessary to repeat on hundreds and hundreds of files that, for example, the Oval Office (Q338067) lies in the West Wing (Q1932621) of the White House (Q35525) which is located in Washington, D.C. (Q61); all that information is readily available on Wikidata, and it's quite sufficient to store it there, just once. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:42, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

And likely if there is a desire for things like this to be shown on commons, that should be some form of UI / software change to expose that to commons viewers / editors. *addshore* ^{talk to me!} 12:04, 2 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

Relevant to what Werkmeister said above is iiuc this request: Template talk:Geogroup#Also include files geolocated to countries/places via subcategories but not coordinates. Currently, the coordinates used in the superordinate category Wikidata item is not used/shown by the map. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:32, 2 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't know much about Wikicrowd, and don't particularly care to, but is it actively encouraging edits like [1], or did this user just happen to do that? I suppose the edit is not actively harmful, but to take a picture of two people, at least one of whom has a Wikidata item, and say that what it depicts is a microphone seems really useless. It might as well say it depicts a wall and water bottle. - Jmabel ! talk 18:50, 18 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

(Courtesy ping @Ranjithsiji, who made the edit, and @Addshore, who made the tool.)

The edit summary would seem to suggest that the statement was effectively copied from the file's membership in Category:Microphones (or more specifically Category:People with microphones). I'm not convinced that depicts statement is significantly worse than the category, which has been on that file since 2021. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 19:05, 18 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

Depicts says entity visually depicted in an image . In this image there is a Microphone and it is clearly visible. There are humans, May be people who has wikidata item. We can add more than one depicts into an image. So I don't see a problem here. THe microphone is not make prominent here. Ranjithsiji (talk) 19:16, 18 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

I also believe the edit is fine, though of course I'm happy to tweak the tool to guide based on what the community in general wants and finds acceptable. My understanding though mirrors the above comment, which is the microphone is clearly depicted, and thus should likely be included.

Really, the unfortunate thing is that JessAnn Smith and pianist and music historian Eric Hung who are photographed don't have entries on Wikidata, and thus can not also be added as depicted. For the benefit of this conversation, however, I have gone ahead and said that they also depict "person" *addshore* ^{talk to me!} 12:25, 21 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

And this? - Jmabel ! talk 20:48, 31 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

Again, there probably isn't anything wrong with that image saying depicts trousers, likely it should also have other depicts statements also (which I have gone ahead and added https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:No_Kings_NYC_(October_2025)_41.jpg&diff=1140570455&oldid=1139705827)

It all really depends on what people want to be able to look for within the dataset of commons images. *addshore* ^{talk to me!} 14:25, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply