Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a
media repository of
free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media.
It is a project of the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
.
Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects
in all languages, including
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
,
Wikivoyage
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...
,
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...
,
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast refer ...
,
Wiktionary
Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a numbe ...
,
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be ...
,
Wikibooks
Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that an ...
, and
Wikispecies
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive open content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wa ...
, or downloaded for offsite use. As of July 2022, the repository contains over 87 million free-to-use media files, managed and editable by registered volunteers.
[ Statistics page on Wikimedia Commons]
History
The idea for the project came from
Erik Möller
Erik Möller (born 1979) is a German freelance journalist, software developer, author, and former deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), based in San Francisco. Möller additionally works as a web designer and previously managed hi ...
in March 2004
and Wikimedia Commons were launched in September 7, 2004.
In July 2013, the number of edits on Commons reached 100,000,000.
Since 2018 it became possible to upload 3D models to the site. One of the first models uploaded to Commons was a reconstruction of the Asad Al-Lat statue which was destroyed in
Palmyra
Palmyra (; Palmyrene: () ''Tadmor''; ar, تَدْمُر ''Tadmur'') is an ancient city in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. Archaeological finds date back to the Neolithic period, and documents first mention the city in the early secon ...
by the
ISIL
An Islamic state is a state that has a form of government based on Islamic law (sharia). As a term, it has been used to describe various historical polities and theories of governance in the Islamic world. As a translation of the Arabic term ...
in 2015.
Various notable organizations had uploaded files to Commons. In 2012, the
National Archives and Records Administration
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It ...
uploaded
100,000 digitised images from its collection. In 2020, the
Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after two and a half years of dev ...
(DPLA) started uploading its collections to Commons. In 2022, DPLA uploaded more than 2 million files. Similarly
Europeana
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...
, the website aggregating European cultural heritage, shares its digitised images through Commons. During the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
, as part of a collaboration with Wikimedia, the
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of ...
(WHO) uploaded its "
Mythbusters" infographics to Commons.
Relation to sister projects
The stated aim of Wikimedia Commons is to provide a media file repository "that makes available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to all, and that acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation." The expression "educational" is to be understood according to its broad meaning of "providing knowledge; instructional or informative".
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 (such as
fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
content) which local project policies allow, but which would not be permitted according to the
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
policy of Commons. Wikimedia Commons itself does not allow fair use or uploads under non-free licenses, including licenses which restrict commercial use of materials or disallow derivative works. For this reason, Wikimedia Commons always hosts freely licensed media and deletes copyright violations. Licenses that are acceptable include the
Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution/ShareAlike licenses, other free content and
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
licenses, and the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
.
The default language for 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 Wikimedia Commons are categorized using MediaWiki's category system. In addition, they are 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
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...
.
Controversial content
The site has been criticized for hosting large amounts of amateur pornography, often uploaded by
exhibitionists who exploit the site for personal gratification, and who are enabled by sympathetic administrators.
In 2012,
BuzzFeed described Wikimedia Commons as "littered with dicks".
In 2010, Wikipedia co-founder
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...
reported Wikimedia Commons to the FBI for hosting sexualized images of children known as "
lolicon". After this was reported in the media,
Jimmy Wales, founder of the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
which hosts Commons, used his administrator status to delete several images without discussion from the Commons community. Wales responded to the backlash from the Commons community by voluntarily relinquishing some site privileges, including the ability to delete files.
Utilities
Over time, additional functionality has been developed to interface Wikimedia Commons with the other 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 ("").
Specialized uploading tools and scripts such as "
Commonist" have been created to simplify the process of uploading large numbers of files. At one time, in order to review free content photos uploaded to
Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...
, users could participate in a now-defunct collaborative external review process (""), which resulted in more than 10,000 uploads to Commons.There exists a community-maintained Commons Mobile App which allows uploading of photos that document the world, especially notable objects findable in the map in the Nearby List in the app (displaying Wikidata items with coordinates). The app launched in 2012 as an official Wikimedia app and since May 2016, it uses the official Wikimedia Commons name and logo.
Structured Data on Commons
Structured Data on Commons (SDC) is a three-year
software development project funded by the
Sloan Foundation
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors.
The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support o ...
to provide the infrastructure for Wikimedia Commons volunteers to organize data about media files in a consistent manner. This data is structured more and is made
machine-readable. The goals of the functionality are to make contributing to Commons easier by providing new ways to edit, curate, and write
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
for Commons, and to make general use of Commons easier by expanding capabilities in
search and reuse.
Quality
There are three mechanisms on the site for recognizing high-quality works. One is known as "
Featured pictures", 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 "
Quality images" began in June 2006, and has a simpler nomination process comparable to "Featured pictures". "Quality images" only accepts works created by Wikimedia users, whereas "Featured pictures" additionally accepts nominations of works by third parties such as NASA. A third image assessment project, known as "
Valued images", began on June 1, 2008, with the purpose of recognizing "the most valued illustration of its kind", in contrast to the other two processes which assess images mainly on technical quality.
The three mentioned processes select a slight part (less than 0.1%) from the total number of files. However, Commons collects files of all quality levels, from the most professional level across simple documental and amateur files up to files of very poor quality. Generally, Commons is not a competition but a collection; a quality of the description and organization of files and their descriptive and informational benefits are often more relevant than technical or artistic perfection of the files. Files with specific defects can be tagged for improvement and warning or even proposed for deletion but there exists no process of systematic rating of all files.
The site held its inaugural "Picture of the Year" competition in 2006. All images that were made a Featured picture during 2006 were eligible, and voted on by eligible
Wikimedia movement
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects. This community directly builds and administers the projects. It is committed to using open standards and software.
...
members during two rounds of voting. The winning picture was a picture of the
Aurora Borealis
An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...
over snowlands, taken by an airman from the
U.S. Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sign ...
. The competition has since become an annual event.
Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year
The
Commons Picture of the Year (POTY) is a competition that was first run in 2006. It aims to identify the best
freely licensed images
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
from those that during the year have been
award
An award, sometimes called a distinction, is something given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field. When the token is a medal, ribbon or other item designed for wearing, it is known as a decoration.
An awar ...
ed
Featured picture status.
These are the images which have won each year's POTY:
File:Holy SURP Hovhannes Church.jpg, 2021
File:2021 collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021; Protesters in Yangon, Myanmar following the coup d'état; A civil demonstration against the October 2021 coup in Sudan; Crowd shortly after t ...
File:Alcedo_atthis_-_Riserve_naturali_e_aree_contigue_della_fascia_fluviale_del_Po.jpg, 2020
2020 was heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global social and economic disruption, mass cancellations and postponements of events, worldwide lockdowns and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression in t ...
File:Mud_Cow_Racing_-_Pacu_Jawi_-_West_Sumatra,_Indonesia.jpg, 2019
File:2019 collage v1.png, From top left, clockwise: Hong Kong protests turn to widespread riots and civil disobedience; House of Representatives votes to adopt articles of impeachment against Donald Trump; CRISPR gene editing first used to experim ...
File:Evolution of a Tornado.jpg, 2018
File:2018 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in PyeongChang, South Korea; Protests erupt following the Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi; March for Our Lives protests take place across the Unit ...
File:Perereca-macaco - Phyllomedusa rohdei.jpg, 2017
File:2017 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The War Against ISIS at the Battle of Mosul (2016-2017); aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing; The Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 ("Great American Eclipse"); North Korea tests a s ...
File:Jubilee and Munin, Ravens, Tower of London 2016-04-30.jpg, 2016
File:2016 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Bombed-out buildings in Ankara following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt; the Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, impeachment trial of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff; Damaged houses duri ...
File:Pluto-01 Stern 03 Pluto Color TXT.jpg, 2015
File:A butterfly feeding on the tears of a turtle in Ecuador.jpg, 2014
File:2014 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Stocking up supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for the Western African Ebola virus epidemic; Citizens examining the ruins after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping; Bundles of wat ...
File:Glühwendel brennt durch.jpg, 2013
File:2013 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: Edward Snowden becomes internationally famous for leaking classified NSA wiretapping information; Typhoon Haiyan kills over 6,000 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; The Dhaka garment fa ...
File:Pair of Merops apiaster feeding.jpg, 2012
File:2012 Events Collage V3.png, From left, clockwise: The passenger cruise ship Costa Concordia lies capsized after the Costa Concordia disaster; Damage to Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, New Jersey as a result of Hurricane Sandy; People gat ...
File:Lake Bondhus Norway 2862.jpg, 2011
File:Laser Towards Milky Ways Centre.jpg, 2010
File:Sikh pilgrim at the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar, India.jpg, 2009
File:Biandintz eta zaldiak - modified2.jpg, 2008
File:2008 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Lehman Brothers went bankrupt following the Subprime mortgage crisis; Cyclone Nargis killed more than 138,000 in Myanmar; A scene from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing; ...
File:Broadway tower edit.jpg, 2007
File:Polarlicht 2.jpg, 2006
Content figures
''Source:
commons:Commons:Milestones''
* November 30, 2006: 1 million media files
* September 2, 2009: 5 million media files
* April 15, 2011: 10 million media files
* December 4, 2012: 15 million media files
* July 14, 2013: 100,000,000 edits
* January 25, 2014: 20 million media files
* January 13, 2016: 30 million media files
* June 21, 2017: 40 million media files
* October 7, 2018: 50 million media files
* March 18, 2020: 60 million media files
* February 15, 2021: 70 million media files
* January 11, 2022: 80 million media files
* Current figures:
commons:Special:Statistics
See also
*
Creative Commons – a project providing a set of content licenses and a directory of works using them
*
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
– an online collection of videos, documents and webpages
*
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
– the largest freely accessible collection of documents (including books and sheet music)
*
Reporting of child pornography images on Wikimedia Commons
References
External links
*
Mirror of Wikimedia Commonsby
WikiTeam
{{Authority control
Advertising-free websites
Articles containing video clips
Free content
Image-sharing websites
Internet properties established in 2004
MediaWiki websites
Multilingual websites
Open content projects
Photo archives
Stock photography
Video hosting
Wikimedia projects
Stock media