FlickypediaBackfillrBot

This user account is a bot operated by Alexwlchan (talk). Improves the structured data on Flickr photos that have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons It is flagged as bot. It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually.
Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

tasks • contribs • count • logs • page moves • block user • block log • flag log • global contribs • flag bot

This is a bot run by the Flickr Foundation.

This bot is a project spun out of Commons:Flickypedia, a tool for uploading Flickr photos to Wikimedia Commons. When somebody uploads a photo using Flickypedia, it will add structured data fields to the file on Commons, including:

The new Flickr photo ID property (‎Flickr photo ID (P12120))
A link to the original photo on Flickr (source of file (P7482))
The license of the photo on Flickr (copyright license (P275))

For a full description of the structured data mapping, see Commons:Flickypedia/Data Modeling.

Flickypedia Backfillr Bot will apply this same structured data mapping to existing Flickr photos on Commons.

Key info

Operator: User:Alexwlchan, working for the Flickr Foundation
Tasks: Update structured data for Flickr photos that have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
Operation: Automatically
When: Manually triggered, by paging through an SDC snapshot
Maximum edit rate: tbc, probably 5–10 edits per second
Language: Python

How it works

Running the bot will be a manual process with the following steps:

Download one of the structured data dumps from Commons.
Go through every entry in that snapshot (≈ every file on Wikimedia Commons), looking for Flickr photos. This will likely involve looking at either the source URL or the Flickr photo ID properties.
Look to see if the photo has all the structured data fields that can be populated from the Flickr metadata.
If any fields are missing, get the photo metadata from the Flickr API, then add the necessary fields to the file on Commons.

Eventually every Flickr photo the bot can find on Wikimedia Commons will have a consistent set of structured data, similar to that set by Flickypedia.

FAQs

How does it handle existing/conflicting statements?

Backfillr Bot is purely additive – it will create new statements, or add qualifiers to existing statements, but it will never remove useful information.

If it wants to write a statement that conflicts with an existing statement, it will flag it for manual attention, and not write anything to Commons.

(There are a few case where it will remove existing statements, but these are places where the existing data is obviously wrong – e.g. creators who have author name string (P2093) = null.)

What sort of data is it copying to Commons?

Backfillr Bot only uses public information which is available in the Flickr API – the same information you could see if you open the photo on Flickr.com.

Suggesting improvements

For now, to suggest an update to the SDC mapping, please leave a comment on Commons:Flickypedia/Data Modeling.

At some point there may be a dedicated page for the standalone library; tbc.