If there has been any research it is likely to be out of date. Wikimedia Commons is probably our fastest growing major project - it has grown by a fifth in just the last 8 months. Last August it had only 14 million files and has gained 2.8 million since then.
The contents are much more skewed to mass imports from elsewhere than Wikipedia is, and as those mass imports happen so they change the average composition of the wiki.
Another big influence is national legislation, we probably have far more images from countries which have freedom of panorama laws that are compatible with commons than from countries that don't have such laws.Another factor is historical, countries that have systematically replaced old monuments may have less to take pictures of. Hence Commons has a massive skew towards the UK which has 0.1% of the world's landmass, 1% of its population but rather more than 10% of Commons files. I've uploaded quite a few UK images myself, and I have hundreds of images of Georgia that I can't upload to Commons but can upload to other image sharing sites.
If you are considering research by useage you might find it useful to check https://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php
Jonathan
On 29 April 2013 19:59, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
It is very interesting but very little has been researched http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons
The same with other sister projects (Wiktionary, wikibooks, wikisource...).
Research is highly biased towards Wikipedia. Neither other wikifarms have been studied.
2013/4/29 Heather Ford hfordsa@gmail.com
Does anyone know of research on images on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons?
Thanks in advance!
Best, heather.
Heather Ford Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Programme www.ethnographymatters.net @hfordsa on Twitter http://hblog.org
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