I am happy to relay that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million files. This is around 11 months after we reached one million. Since
This is really exciting. Any stats on how quickly audio and video filetypes are growing?
A couple of features people may not be aware of:
- geocoding - every picture that is geotagged gets a little "Earth"
icon and clicking on it launches a map that shows the image located on the map, as well as other geotagged images nearby. It's really cool. The geocoding folk are very innovative and welcoming so if you are interested in helping them out or just finding out other cool ways this can be used, please talk to them. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Geocoding
These folks are amazing.
By #users we are the 8th largest project. By #edits we are the 9th largest project.
and by # of languages on one wiki, the largest by far...
It is a very interesting time to be involved with Commons. We face many social and technical problems that are yet to be resolved. Are our current processes for dealing with things (eg: uploading, tagging as copyvio, deletion discussion, deletion, adminship) scaling well - will they continue to cope or will they get overloaded? How can we face the joint challenges of welcoming new users on one hand and yet tackling the never-ending stream of copyvios on the other? How can we provide equal opportunity for our users to participate regardless of the languages they do or don't speak?
The social problems are ours to ponder, yet I can't help feeling that our work is made more difficult by using inappropriate tools. MediaWiki is a great tool for writing an encyclopedia in a single language, but it has some significant shortcomings when used in a multilingual media-based environment that only become more problematic as Commons gets larger. Therefore I sincerely hope that the Foundation will consider hiring or contracting developers specifically for problems that affect Commons, within the next couple of years.
Is there a list of outstanding feature requests for active commons users? A place for gathering problems that don't yet have good solutions?
SJ