A few weeks ago, visiting a friend in London, I did the usual quick round of museums; when at the Imperial War Museum, I took a pile of photographs of various exhibits. I put them on flickr, and made a mental note to put them on Commons at some point. Of course, what with one thing and another, I never got round to it.
Since then, someone's transferred several over to be used as illustrations for a handful of enwp articles, used one as the basis for writing another article entirely, and left me a very nice note to explain this...
I can't help but shake the feeling that our system *works* :-)