The ISA Tool

Easily Add Information to Images on Wikimedia Commons

ISA Tool is a multilingual ‘game’ that makes it fun and easy for anyone to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons to improve images’ description and increase their accessibility and searchability.

The ISA Tool enables users to make micro-contributions (descriptions, captions and tags) to images donated to Wikimedia Commons by the vibrant and diverse Wikimedia Community. The ISA Tool facilitates deeper engagement with the content on Wikimedia Commons and also plays a crucial role in making the repository more accessible and informative for people worldwide.

ISA was built to provide multilingual and structured descriptions for the Wiki Loves X images. It is now used for all image ﬁles on Wikimedia Commons, and is especially useful for GLAM and local communities.

ISA was developed as a collaboration between Wiki In Africa, Histropedia and the Structured Data on Commons project. It is a GLAM pilot for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.

ISA received the coolest tool WikidataCon 2019 Award in the Multimedia category October 2019 and the Coolest Tool Award at Wikimania 2024, category Eggbeater! In 2025, Egbe Eugene (the main maintainer of the tool and one of its primary developers) won the Tech Wikimedian of the Year award during Wikimania Nairobi. On accepting his award, he mentioned that the ISA Tool is the project/tool he was most interested in and spent much of his time on. At the Wikimania Nairobi Hackathon, Eugene also gathered Wikimedians who were interested in the tool. He has since organised an ISA Spotlight Session during the WikiMentor Africa Tool Series (an online hackathon after Wikimania to involve more people in this community to help improve ISA further).

What does the name mean?

‘Isa’ is the chiShona language word for ‘put’ or ‘place’, but it can also serve as an acronym for Information Structured Acceleration, Information Structure Additions and more.