Wikimedia Foundation Nabs $3 Million Grant To Improve Accessibility of Free Commons' Content

As with other Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimedia Commons (a repository of free-to-use media assets, including photos, audio clips, and videos) is funded through donations, and the organization has now received $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic body set up in 1934 by the former president and CEO of General Motors. From a report on VentureBeat: With $3 million in the coffers, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will embark on a three-year mission to link assets on Wikimedia Commons with Wikidata, the organization's crowdsourced knowledge base. The upshot of this endeavor will mean that photos, videos, and all the rest will be much easier to find and, crucially, it will be "machine-readable" which opens up a wealth of opportunities to automate the process of integrating content into third-party services, such as apps and services operated by museums, galleries, and libraries. On the flip-side, this will also make it easier for third-party bodies to donate content to Wikimedia Commons while automatically including existing metadata, bypassing the need to manually label media. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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