Will you join in celebrating Wikimedia Commons?

NOTICE: This is a copy of a post from DIFF from 10 years ago as there is no new article to celebrate 20 years of Commons…maybe it is informative and/or inspirational for people to join in and spontaneously celebrate Wikimedia Commons ?!?

Will you join in celebrating the 10th anniversary of Wikimedia Commons?

5 September 2014 by Lila Tretikov

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Commons logo
Wikimedia Commons is turning 10 years old this Sunday — will you help celebrate? We’re asking everyone to join the Wikimedia community by sharing a freely licensed image with world.
Wikimedia Commons is one of the world’s largest resources of freely licensed educational media. It is the central repository of the majority of illustrations for Wikipedia, and it includes more than 22 million images of everything from the first human flight to the last of the quaggas. Historical treasures, like an 8th century Chinese star map, can be found alongside the most recent stars of the annual Eurovision song contest.
You can find the images on Commons illustrating the articles on Wikipedia, as the photographs in your newspapers, and as diagrams in your school projects. They are always freely licensed, and include the contributions of individual amateur photographers alongside donations from the collections of the world’s leading archives.
All this is possible thanks to the incredible work of the volunteer Wikimedia Commons community. Over ten years, four million registered users have uploaded the images and other media, curated licensing and attribution information, created categories, organized metadata, and removed non-educational content or images that are not freely licensed.[1] In addition to their work on-wiki, these volunteers have inspired partnerships with leading cultural institutions in order to make even more images and media available to the world.

The very first photograph uploaded to Wikimedia Commons ("Quail1.PNG " by Node, under CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The very first photograph uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (“Quail1.PNG “ by Node, today under CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Wikimedia Commons officially launched on September 7th, 2004, with an informal email to a Wikimedia mailing list. The note, which pointed users to commons.wikimedia.org, expressed a vague hope that someday the project would “get[s] its own domain.” (We’re happy to say that it’s still right there!) That same day, user:Node_ue uploaded the very first photograph, a snapshot of two wild Gambel’s quail, taken while they “happen[ed] to be eating birdseed in my parents’ backyard.”
The creation of Commons had been suggested by then-volunteer Wikimedian Erik Moeller (today the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation). His initial March 2004 proposal for a central repository for images, public domain texts, and other freely licensed documents expressed the hope that Commons could “provide the largest such repository of freely licensed material, with a quality control mechanism” — the Wikimedia community itself – “that other projects lack.”
The years since have witnessed creativity, collaborations, and even competitions — all originating from the Commons community — , evidence that its initial vision has become reality.
Over the past decade, the Commons community has greatly expanded the depth, content, and availability of photographs, historical documents, and other materials through partnerships with cultural institutions, known to Wikimedians as GLAMs (for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). Donations from organizations such as the French National Library and the German National Archives have added priceless educational and cultural richness to Wikimedia Commons. This past summer, the U.S. National Archives, having already provided more than 100,000 images, announced its intention to upload all of its holdings to Commons.
Wikimedia Commons is also the home of the community-created Wiki Loves Monuments competition, now in its fifth year and currently inviting entries until the end of September. Wiki Loves Monuments, which asks people from around the globe to share images of their cultural heritage, including historic buildings, monuments, and other creations, has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest photo competition in the world.
We’re celebrating these and many more achievements and milestones on this 10th anniversary, and we’re asking you to celebrate with us. How can you get started? There’s a good guide here, but in general Commons is always looking for freely-licensed images that are not yet part of its collection, especially high quality images for Wikipedia articles that don’t yet have illustrations, or images of notable people, places, or historic events. If you don’t have a freely-licensed image of your own to share, you may want to consider starting a conversation with your local cultural institution about how they might contribute their collection to Commons.
By sharing appropriate images under a free license, you’re becoming a member of the Commons community of creators and curators, and ensuring the project’s strength for another decade to come.
Lila Tretikov, Executive Director

  1. In doing so, Wikimedia Commons volunteers have become well acquainted with the intricacies of international copyright law (did you know that users have researched and documented the “freedom of panorama” regulations for 147 countries on Commons?). The Commons’ community’s careful curation of images is evidenced by the extremely low number of copyright takedown requests received by the Foundation each year, as documented in our recently released transparency report.

A selection of images from Wikimedia Commons (you can also browse through the full collection of 6,389 Featured Pictures – images that the community has chosen to be highlighted as some of the finest on Commons):

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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NOTICE: This is a copy of a post from WIKINEWS from 19 years
Wikimedia Commons celebrates first anniversary - Wikinews, the free news source

Wikimedia Commons celebrates first anniversary

25x25 This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, one of its projects, or people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

One year ago today, September 7, 2004, the Wikimedia Commons project was presented to the public. Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a repository for multimedia files that include images, videos, computer animations, and music as well as spoken texts. They currently count more than 232,000 such files.

All of Commons content is published under a free licence, so the use of its files is permitted outside the project itself. Its main mission is to provide the international Wikipedias with images. Like Wikipedia, the Commons is based on a simple wiki principle that permits every user to contribute and change content. The project is organized into so-called gallery pages, and/or by adding files into categories organized in multiple topics that help facilitate the speedy location of desired files. Often it exists already a direct link from the Wikipedia page to the corresponding page in the Commons.

The Wikimedia Commons proposal was originated by the German Erik Möller, (Eloquence), in March 2004. Eloquence was until recently the Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. Up until the launch of Commons, it was time consuming to use material from one Wikipedia language project in a sister project of a different language. Each file had to be uploaded into each language edition of Wikipedia, and be described and licensed again. The goal was to reduce this redundant effort into one upload, which it can be said that this was successful.

The language in use on the project’s Main Page is English because it is an international project, but many information pages exist in multiple languages. Judging by the experience of other Wikimedia Foundation projects, it is only a question of time before further localization occurs at Commons. This will make it easier for users with fewer skills in foreign languages to also contribute files.

The content in the Commons is growing at a rapid pace. Within the last month alone, the number of images and other files has grown by more than 43,000. This represents a 22,7 % increase in relation to the prior month. While the Wikipedia projects usually compare themselves with the more widely known encyclopedias like Britannica and Brockhaus, a competitor Commons would likely be considered the huge commercial photo archives like Getty Images and Corbis, who possess more than 70 million images each. In relation to them, the Commons is very small at the moment. However, most of the important buildings and landmarks world wide are already featured in its database.

Like other Wikimedia Foundation projects, the Commons face certain challenges and problems. Sometimes people upload offensive images. The community has had to establish clear criteria about which content is acceptable, and which is not. There should not be unfair censorship. Obvious transgressions can be pointed out by anybody, and they are usually deleted rapidly by the administrators.

A sensitive topic is copyrights, and the rights of the owner of the pictured images. International rules have not yet been made compatible. In certain ways, the Wikimedia Foundation opens new territory in the area of intellectual property. Before Commons, it was almost exclusively a domain of professionals to publish images who were well aware of the legal issues. Now it is possible for huge numbers of photo amateurs to publish. Like with offensive content, obvious violations of copyright are deleted the moment they are brought to notice of the administrators. However, it is quite possible there will be an upcoming international debate if the free publication of certain content, e.g. images of national heritage objects, is in the overwhelming public interest. In cases such as this, private interests which might prevent publication are of lesser importance.

The contribution of Wikimedia Commons to a wide array of issues in research, reporting, education, tourism or others, at a global scale, is difficult to fathom at the moment. Most likely though the impact will be gigantic.

Sources

:+1: thanks for this info.