Wikimedia Commons reaches 400,000 Files

Brushen writes "Wikimedia Commons, a website built to be a repository of free, public domain, or GFDL images, sounds, and animations, has reached 400,000 files this week. Launched in September 2004 by the Wikimedia Foundation, the creators of Wikipedia, the organization intended for it to be a source of images that could be used in the rest of the organization's projects. As well, recently they've had a best picture comeptition."

They managed to...

...find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Re:They managed to...

Well, they actuall do have pron :) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_wo men [wikimedia.org]

Impressive, but...

How many of the media files have been taken despite being under copyright? I've seen the obvious and/or controversial images removed -- pretty promptly in most cases. But how about an image taken from a website with no watermark taken from a website where the webmaster has no time to pursue misappropriation.

Although if they truly have 400 000 original images that have been validly released for them to use, more power to them.

Re:Impressive, but...

Well, many of the images are not original, in fact a large portion of them are public domain due to age or some other reason. But Wikimedia Commons is much better than Wikipedia with regard to inclusion of copyright violations. The vast majority of images on Wikimedia Commons are in fact public domain or under a free license.

Good idea to post it on ./

Now there will be 100k more files, of which 99k are called hello.jpg ;)

When will the first lawsuit hit?

400,000 files seems like an awful lot of licenses to verify. Having said that, this is a real boon to graphic artists, 3D animators and the like. Gotta love that CC license.

Come on CmdrTaco, SpellCheck Isn't Hard

...best picture comeptition."

Taco, is it really that hard to correct "comeptition" to "competition"?

You are supposedly an editor, yet you can't even be bothered to use a spellcheck?

I know he says this doesn't matter on slashdot and that it is just minutiae, but most people would say it does matter a great deal. This site is run by paid editors, it is long past time they act like it.

Page worth a visit

400,000 files is very impressive achievement. I've only ever listed to sounds on Wikicommons a few times though; I don't think they are too useful.

Anyway, I think the following page is worth a visit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sunrise [wikimedia.org]

More royalty free pics, lucky corporate media orgs

Well, as a photographer I'm not sure I welcome this. Yeah, Adobe has entered the royalty free sector, for cheap-ass business users looking for cheesy pics of people in suits shaking hands. That was never a market I competed in. Wikipedia worries me because well funded media organisations are going to stop paying for real photographers to do stuff like "we need a picture of Barcelona for a travel story". Oh, get a wikimedia image, pay nobody, increase value add for our shareholders. And I guess I don't care about that either because I don't have any pictures of Barcelona. And there are no serious ethical issues of working in Barcelona. But for stuff I do have, like a refugee camp someplace quite logistically hard to get to or work in, or for a picture of the leader of this rebel group, or of a soccer team in a war zone. Is this sort of thing better when it's taken by a kid who doesn't speak the language who's just left college and is doing the peace corps thing, and decides to donate all this holiday snaps to wikimedia(though the pics are lowish resolution and miscaptioned). Or should that kind of thing be done by AP or Reuters who employ (for example) someone in the refugee camp who knows what's going on. Or by independent foreign journalists with their own set of biases? Yeah, we should all adapt to the market, worse is better, etc. I'm watching people who are cross subsidising photography with other income sources eat away at my market, and I don't like it.

Re:More royalty free pics, lucky corporate media o

Ok....so you've expressed your displeasure with the current market forces, you admit you need to adapt to the new situation...what do you plan on doing about it? You seem to be almost trying to argue that it is not ethically right for some peace corps college kid to upload his pictures because it deprives you of revenue...or maybe I just read that wrong.

Don't forget other CC sources

Flicker's CC material [flickr.com] has over 8 million pictures now, all CC categories summarized. Even if you restrict yourself to the CC license subset Wikimedia uses, there's still more pictures on Flickr. However, Wikimedia possibly has a more "professional" set of pictures, rather than "here's me and my girlfriend on vacation" pictures, but with Flickr's powerful tagging system, I still recommend people looking for CC pictures suiting their license needs to check them out. I've found a surprising number of high quality photos there that suits Wikipedia perfectly, but keep in mind Wikipedia prefers CC material that is NOT restricted to non-commercial use only. When I use images from Flickr on Wikipedia, I usually use the most free license -- the Attribution license. Then it's a simple matter to attribute the picture with a link and author in the image description when you upload it.

Of course, don't forget Google's Advanced Search which nowadays support searching for CC licenses material too. If you're still looking, Wikipedia's public domain resource list [wikipedia.org] is another good starting point.

More creative commons...

In related news, the Geograph project [geograph.org.uk] has 108,000 CC-licensed photos now.

This is hardly news

This is an advertisment for wikimedia. They want you to donate to their recent fundraiser. Kinda shameful having slashdot post it.

Never mind the quality, feel the number

So how many of those 400,000 files are from Wikipedians uploading their entire collection of holiday photos? And how many are actually any good?

Re:Quick!

If we /. the wikimedia servers, we can start another fund drive! Who wants to hear another personal appeal from Jimbo?

Slashdot couldn't overwhelm their servers even if they wanted to. They get a LOT more traffic than Slashdot does.

Re:Why am I not thoroughly impressed?

The non-free files referred to are basically just all the project logos. All of them can be found here [wikimedia.org]

The only other exception I can think of is the spoken version of GFDL [wikimedia.org], as absurdly enough, GFDL itself isn't GFDL compatible (modification isn't allowed)...

Re:They had a best picture competition too

Does one haf to spel badly to subskribe to /.?

No, for subscribers it is optional. It is only compulsory for the editors.

Re:Quick!

I'd put in more money... if I could afford it. Right now I'm paying nearly 350 a month for my three piles and that will be moving to 400 come june... an amount I have no idea how I will afford.

Re:Quick!

even though 2.875% is a /really/ good interist rate, any interist you pay is wasted money

Straying wildly off topic here, but you are wrong. It is very easy to get a savings account that pays a greater rate of interest. If you have enough money to repay the loan, and you put it in a savings account rather than repaying the loan, then at the end you will have more money than if you paid off the loan.