Everything about The Wikimedia Commons totally explained
The
Wikimedia Commons (or
WikiCommons) is a repository of
free content images, sound and other multimedia files. It is a project of the
Wikimedia Foundation, and the files uploaded to the Commons repository can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all
languages, including
Wikipedia,
Wikibooks,
Wikisource and
Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use, as all of the content is either in the
public domain or released under free licenses such as the
GNU Free Documentation License.
As of January 2008, the repository contained over 2 million media files.
History
The project was proposed by
Erik Möller in
March 2004 and launched on
September 7,
2004, A key motivation behind the setup of a central repository was the desire to reduce duplication of effort across the Wikimedia projects and languages, as the same file had to be uploaded to many different wikis separately before the Commons was created. The technical feature to use any file from the Commons on any Wikimedia project was implemented and enabled in
October 2004, which led to rapid adoption of Commons as a repository. The project logo was created by Reid Beels, who had initially submitted it to a logo contest for
Wikinews. It was entered into the Commons logo competition, which it won, and was officially adopted in November 2004.
In April 2005,
Directmedia Publishing, a Berlin company which also publishes a
German language edition of
Wikipedia on
DVD, donated a collection of 10,000 reproductions of
public domain paintings to Wikimedia Commons, which were uploaded together with
metadata about the art and its creators.
On
May 24,
2005, Wikimedia Commons reached a milestone of 100,000 uploaded media files (excluding thousands of weather and market data images for Wikinews). It also received an honorary mention at the 2005
Prix Ars Electronica awards in May 2005. On
November 30,
2006, it reached the one millionth uploaded file. A 'mosaic' of the Wikimedia Foundation logo was manually created by the site's editors to celebrate the milestone.
Over time, additional functionality has been developed to interface Wikimedia Commons with the Wikimedia projects. Daniel Kinzler wrote applications for finding appropriate categories for uploaded files ("CommonSense"), determining the usage of files across the Wikimedia projects ("CheckUsage"), locating images with missing copyright information ("UntaggedImages"), and relaying information about administrative actions such as deletions to the relevant wikis (""). The website also has a new, more image-focused
search engine called
Mayflower
.
Specialized uploading tools and scripts such as "Commonist" have been created to simplify the process of uploading large numbers of files. In order to review free content photos uploaded to
Flickr, users can participate in a collaborative external review process (""), which has resulted in more than 10,000 uploads to Commons.
Policies and usage
Most Wikimedia projects still allow local uploads which are not visible to other projects or languages, but this option is meant to be used primarily for material which local project policies allow, but which wouldn't be permitted according to the
copyright policy of the Commons, such as
fair use content. Wikimedia Commons itself doesn't allow fair use or uploads under non-free licenses, including licenses which restrict commercial use of materials or disallow derivative works. Licenses that are acceptable include the
GNU Free Documentation License,
Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike licenses, and the
public domain.
Given its primary function as a supporting project for the other Wikimedia web sites, the main content policy for files uploaded to the Commons is that they must be potentially useful on any of the Wikimedia projects. This excludes material such as purely personal pictures and artwork, in contrast to image sharing repositories like
Flickr,
Facebook and
DeviantArt. Nevertheless, large numbers of files hosted on the Commons are not used directly on any Wikimedia project and likely never will be; as such, the project has grown into a repository of multimedia in its own right, which is frequently linked to from articles on
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia websites to provide supplemental materials.
The default language for the Commons is
English, but registered users can customize their interface to use any other available user interface translations. Many content pages, in particular policy pages and portals, have also been translated into various languages. Files on the Wikimedia Commons are categorized using MediaWiki's category system. In addition, they're often collected on individual topical gallery pages. While the project was originally proposed to also contain free text files, these continue to be hosted on a sister project,
Wikisource.
Quality
The site has two mechanisms for recognising quality works. One is known as "", where works are nominated and other community members vote to accept or reject the nomination. This process began in November 2004. Another process known as "" began in June 2006, and has a simpler nomination process compared to "Featured pictures". "Quality images" also only accepts works created by Wikimedia users, whereas "Featured pictures" additionally accepts nominations of works by third parties such as NASA.
In January 2007, the site held its inaugural "Picture of the Year" competition, for "". All images that were made a Featured picture during 2006 were eligible, and voted on by eligible
Wikimedia users during two rounds of voting. The winning picture was a picture of the
Aurora Borealis over snowlands, taken by a member of the
US Air Force.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Wikimedia Commons'.
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