Building WikiVisage: Active Learning for Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has over 100 million freely licensed media files. A lot of these are photographs of people, politicians, artists, scientists, and athletes, but most of them lack structured metadata saying who is actually in the picture. That metadata is called Structured Data on Commons (SDC), and the specific property is P180 (depicts). Without it, finding “all photos of Douglas Adams” means someone has to manually tag every single one. There are millions of images that need this. I wanted to see if I could make that process faster. I built WikiVisage to make that process faster. It’s an active learning tool that uses face recognition to help users classify faces in Commons images, builds a lightweight classifier from their input, and then writes the results back as structured data. It’s open source, hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge, and available at wikivisage.toolforge.org. Anyone with a Wikimedia account can use it.