Zooming Out: Can We Integrate IIIF and Wikimedia?

Wikimedia and GLAM institutions share a challenge. How do we make cultural heritage collections accessible at scale without sacrificing quality, provenance, sustainability, or community control? The International Image Interoperability Framework, IIIF, is now used by thousands of institutions to serve high-resolution media through open standards. Wikimedia does not currently integrate IIIF in its core architecture. Should it?

This is a landscape document. It does not propose immediate deployment, architectural replacement, or policy change. It explores whether integration makes sense, and if so, under what conditions. It outlines the opportunity space, catalogs known challenges, and suggests two contained experiments designed for community review. The purpose is to establish common ground for structured dialogue and opt-in pilots. 

Different stakeholders bring legitimate priorities. Commons volunteers care about licensing, performance, and editorial agency. GLAM professionals need attribution, reach, and partnership clarity. WMF engineers focus on maintenance costs and architectural implications. Some challenges are hard, some trade-offs may be unavoidable. The goal is to make the choices visible and open to discussion. The document attempts to address perspectives clearly enough that people can disagree productively. The aim isn't to paper over conflicts: it's to surface them so decisions can be informed.

The questions aren't simple. "Should we integrate?" quickly becomes: How would licensing work? Who maintains it? What happens when performance and features conflict? What about institutions that can't support IIIF? Does bulk upload strengthen Commons or overwhelm it? Can IIIF operate within Wikimedia’s complex culture, and editorial standards? This document doesn't answer questions; it lays them out so stakeholders can answer them together.