Dear Commonists,
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
These images are licensed cc-by-sa. Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.
The images are 800 pixel in size on the longer side, which is near the lower bound for being useful on the internet. We are aware of that, and we hope that after some time, we will be able to get the Archive to release the images in a higher resolution. The quality of the work of Wikimedia Commons might help this negotiation process.
The other part of the cooperation is a a tool for linking people from a list compiled by the Federal Archive to the de.wp Persondata and to the person authority file of the German National Library (something de.wp already does since 2005).
Daniel Kinzler is working on the upload process to Commons and eventually on (semi-)automatically categorizing them.
100.000 images is to my knowledge the single largest donation to Wikimedia Commons so far and I am very hopeful that this is only the start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other archives and image databases.
All the best, Mathias Schindler
FYI: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&lim...