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