• Continue to develop quality review mechanisms, and highlight

high-quality work. The development of [[Commons:Quality Images]] is a great one I think, and I hope mechanisms like this continue to grow. [[Commons:Picture of the Year]] is also proving very successful which is fantastic. One area we are possibly lacking in is in pushing our high quality stuff back out to wikis. It is easy to miss this small %age which is our best of the best. We can promote this stuff by perhaps organising more translations, organising a weekly/monthly newsletter out to wikis that lists these images and suggests possible uses, ...? how else?

you are aware that some projects (french wikipedia to name one) use The commons featured pictures as their featured pictures. Maybe you should try to encourage more to.

• Reach out to local Wikimedia wikis and actively promote "Commons

only" upload policies. Switching to Commons only has massive benefits for both the local wiki (hugely reduced maintenance burden) and us (new contributions). But we all know now that preparation is required to make the transition a success. WE need language-speaking active admins; THEY need to promote Commons policy beforehand and attempt to educate their users as much as possible before the switch. I suggest we create a guide [[Commons:Turning off local uploads]] (or choose another name) to smooth the path for wikis who want to go down this road. We can offer tips from the ES.wp and PT.wp cases (is there another?? I have a feeling there was but I can't remember it, maybe SV.wb?). Maybe one of the steps will be a small group (even one?) of volunteers from the local wiki making contact with a small group of volunteers from Commons, and both groups committing to work together to move to Commons only uploads (community approval pending, of course). For example the Commons person can look for existing language speakers and encourage them to become admins or translate, and identify key pages for translating. I suggest we also start finding out more about the new-wiki creation process, and get involved with groups there, to encourage groups to consider starting their wiki with "Commons only" uploads from the very start. Also, it should be a much easier task to convert non-Wikipedia projects, where there is already a large number of that language admins. For example: EN, DE, ES, FR, NL?, PL. Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity. Some thirty-odd projects there that we already have the capacity to deal with, were they to turn off local uploads.

[note the following starts at the beginning of wikinews history. some of it does not represent current opinions] This is the main reason I'm writing. The English Wikinews (IMHO) is drifting in the opposite direction of those goals. I don't know how many people remember this, but originally, we were started with local uploads turned off. General opinion was fairly strong for commons at the start (I believe, I'm getting this from archived pages so i might misinterpret). On the original proposal page, Angela said, "I strongly suggest that image uploads are turned off on the Wikinews site to encourage use of the Commons, which is an excellent place for the resources that Wikinews will use." http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikinews&oldid=482574#I... However We did turn on image uploads for fair use and some restricted images eventually. (Which is a good thing IMO for fair use and the likes, as long as we keep away from free stuff (which we didn't)) Everything is happy, but then some images at commons start to go missing or be substantially edited. Wikinews is not like other wikimedia projects in we like to make our content and lock it away. No one cares about what happened two years ago, so the article should stay fixed. so when Images start to go away it annoyed people. Anyways, some people got mad at Commons ( http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews_talk:Image_use_policy&... ) and we started to upload "free" media to wikinews. Eventually people got really mad up to the point ( http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews:Bots&oldid=339247 ) where we tried to get a bot to more or less cut commons out of the loop. Although the vote technically passed (about 5-1), but Eloquence managed to convince us otherwise so it never happened. Anyways after that, most images got uploaded to wikinews locally. Slowly opinion of commons got better.

Today there is not really any active anti-commons feelings. Mostly because commons has became a lot nicer. (pfctdayelise especially helped get commons in people's good books again imho). People no longer delete stuff whilly nilly, and if they do, they can always undelete. However there's still not a great deal of pro-commons feelings. When I first came to wikinews, the general opinion was, "if its free, you better be sure to upload to commons". Now a days its, "if you want to you can, but don't go out of your way".

I should probably start uploading our free images to commons (Most of them are well categorized and sourced), but its not exactly at the top of my priority list (My current priority is to bug the crap out of people who didn't source their (locally uploaded) images)

Also it currently doesn't help that we don't have a commons ticker on wikinews. It was disabled because the page got too long, and updates kept failing, which is my fault because i didn't archive it enough, mostly because I didn't get through it all. However it was still very useful (or even the deleted template [[commons:template:Used On Wikinews]] would be quite useful in combination of related changes.

Another thing that might be of help, is to have a special upload page for wikinews. ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:upload?uselang=wikinews ) There are some things for wikinews that don't apply elsewhere, and it'd be good to have a custom page.

• Continue to push local projects to adopt CommonsTickers.

Related to several points above. Vital tool for inter-project harmony!

...sure (:

• Introduce user recognition system.

We are all volunteers, but there's no reason we can't develop an award

system that aims to recognise the time-intensive effort and/or outstandingly high-quality contributions that longterm users have made. The benefits of such a system are two-fold: they give the contributors in question tangible, public and formal recognition of their efforts, which thanks and encourages them; and it offers concrete examples to other users of what kind of conduct is appreciated and needed. I have started writing about this on my user page, but I have some more ideas in my head, that I hope the community will welcome when I finally write them down. :)

Maybe take some inspiration from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Contributing_Reporter_Awards

Here are some things that I hope Commons can achieve over the next 3-5 years.

* Some degree of press recognition and fame :)

Help if google images saw you. I see more images that are local uploads to wikinews come on Google images then stuff from commons.

--bawolff