[Commons-l] 100k image donation to Wikimedia Commons

[Mathias Schindler]

Dear Commonists,

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive
upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a
donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to
the  history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and
are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.

These images are licensed cc-by-sa. Wikimedia Germany and the Federal
Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things,
asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to
grant this kind of license.

The images are 800 pixel in size on the longer side, which is near the
lower bound for being useful on the internet. We are aware of that,
and we hope that after some time, we will be able to get the Archive to release
the images in a higher resolution. The quality of the work of
Wikimedia Commons might help this negotiation process.

The other part of the cooperation is a a tool for linking people from
a list compiled by the Federal Archive to the de.wp Persondata and to
the person authority file of the German National Library (something
de.wp already
does since 2005).

Daniel Kinzler is working on the upload process to Commons and
eventually on (semi-)automatically categorizing them.

100.000 images is to my knowledge the single largest donation to
Wikimedia Commons so far and I am very hopeful that this is only the
start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other
archives and image databases.

All the best,
Mathias Schindler

FYI:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=BArchBot