On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.comwrote:
Commons is an oddball project. Other projects produce work, but Commons stores it. Wikisource could be considered another oddball for the same reason. At this point in time, I would class Commons as a service project (and wikisource as well) because it provides a service to other projects and its only point is to provide a service to other projects.
You are ignoring the efforts of the photographers, graphic artists, restorationists and free image sleuths that consider building the archive at Commons as their primary goal. There is a great deal of content added and maintained in Commons that is uploaded with no particular WMF use in mind. An organizaed and well-documented free content repository -- for use by the wider world -- is valuable regardless of whether the works it contains happen to be used by the WMF.
-Robert Rohde