Structured Data on Commons is the most important development in Wikimedia's usability | the Wikimedia UK blog!

"...One of the biggest complaints about Commons which discourages people from using it is that it’s incredibly hard to find what you’re looking for. People upload files and fill out some information about their content, but not in a particularly systematic or structured way, with minimal automated assistance.

This means that when you try to search for something on Commons, you’ll be presented with a huge array of files with minimal relevance to your search. You can’t even really search for media by date. Which date would you be searching for anyway? The date the media was created, the date it was modified or the date it was uploaded? Without systematic organisation of media on Commons, it will continue to represent a disorderly and overgrown garden that desperately needs work to give it some order.

This is where the Structured Data on Commons (SDoC) project comes in. Funded by a $3m grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the project is running from 2017-19, and will hopefully lead to big changes in the way Commons is structured and used...."