This is not news for people who've been watching closely, but I thought it deserved a "re-post" to give it some additional visibility.

In the last year, the Wikimedia movement has developed some very important content partnerships with cultural institutions such as museums and archives to bring valuable pictures, videos, and other media online. Some but not all of them are categorized here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Commons_partnerships

What's the impact of these partnerships? How are these media used? We didn't have good answers to these questions until very recently. Thanks to the work of Bryan Tong Minh, Magnus Manske, and other engineers, we now have some first good data:

1) The GlobalUsage extension is now re-deployed on Wikimedia Commons, which makes it easy to see where any individual file is used in the Wikimedia universe;

2) The Glamorous script by Magnus Manske gives you that overview for an entire category on Commons.

For example, you can go to http://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php and select the "Images from the German Federal Archive" category. This will show you that out of the 82,457 images uploaded so far, more than 15,000 are currently used in articles. 34 languages use at least 100 images, 11 use at least 1,000. This demonstrates the powerful dynamic of global re-use that uploading media to Wikimedia Commons can result in.

We'll be able to show even more compelling data if we now add the (known) pageview data for the relevant articles. Hopefully this emerging data will contribute to a virtuous circle of new content partnerships. I'll pull together some facts for a blog update on what's happening in the space, but wanted to give a general quick update first. :-)