[Commons-l] daily-image-l now has > 1000 subscribers

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi folks,

I noticed something interesting today: the daily-image-l mailing list
[1] now has 1001 subscribers. It was started in late February 2007, so
in less than a year it has picked up all those people. Pretty cool I
think.

For those who don't know, this mailing list is kind of for people who
are NOT Wikimedians but still maybe interested in getting a free
pretty picture each day. So each day they get a mail with a link to
the image, license info, and captions in as many languages as
provided.

I had a quick look over the membership list to see what language
interface (for mailman) people had used to subscribe. There are 24
different languages! The mailing list is linked on the Commons English
main page, and maybe a dozen or two other language main pages[2], but
certainly not all of them.

I started counting the totals for each language subscription but it
was a bit tedious so I only got about halfway through. ;) Nonetheless
here are some trends:
- Spanish was by far the most used language after English.
- Other highly used languages were French, German, Chinese.
- really surprising: Japanese only had one subscriber [surprising
because ja.wp is the 5th largest Wikipedia, but I think the link is
not on the Japanese main page]
- Polish was also seemingly underrepresented

To see the variety of languages used is really heartening, both for
Commons and also for the general open source translator community!
These are the languages Mailman supports now: [3]
How to add a new language translation: [4]
How to add translations of the Commons POTD captions: go to [5] and
start clicking on redlinks and filling out ones you know :)

The growth in subscribers to this list also says to me that there is a
lot of fairly passive interest in Wikimedia projects that we perhaps
don't capture too well. Any project can start this kind of list: there
is "daily-article-l" for English Wikipedia and there could be for
other languages too. Just suggest the idea to your community, get some
support, make a bugzilla request for the new list, and either set up a
script to automatically mail the content each day, or do it by hand
yourself. If your wiki already has some kind of "daily content" then
it is not too hard to do.

cheers,
Brianna


[1]: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-image-l
[2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Linksearch&target=lists.wikimedia.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fdaily-image-l
[3]: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Languages
[4]: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/i18nhowto
[5]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day