This is not news for people who've been watching closely, but I
thought it deserved a "re-post" to give it some additional visibility.
In the last year, the Wikimedia movement has developed some very
important content partnerships with cultural institutions such as
museums and archives to bring valuable pictures, videos, and other
media online. Some but not all of them are categorized here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Commons_partnerships
What's the impact of these partnerships? How are these media used? We
didn't have good answers to these questions until very recently.
Thanks to the work of Bryan Tong Minh, Magnus Manske, and other
engineers, we now have some first good data:
1) The GlobalUsage extension is now re-deployed on Wikimedia Commons,
which makes it easy to see where any individual file is used in the
Wikimedia universe;
2) The Glamorous script by Magnus Manske gives you that overview for
an entire category on Commons.
For example, you can go to
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php
and select the "Images from the German Federal Archive" category. This
will show you that out of the 82,457 images uploaded so far, more than
15,000 are currently used in articles. 34 languages use at least 100
images, 11 use at least 1,000. This demonstrates the powerful dynamic
of global re-use that uploading media to Wikimedia Commons can result
in.
We'll be able to show even more compelling data if we now add the
(known) pageview data for the relevant articles. Hopefully this
emerging data will contribute to a virtuous circle of new content
partnerships. I'll pull together some facts for a blog update on
what's happening in the space, but wanted to give a general quick
update first. :-)
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate