[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons: Service project or not?

[Huib Laurens]

Hello,

I want to start with thanking Effe iets anders, this is the most neutral 
email about Commons I have seen this week, and I like the fact that 
there is a new angle to work with.

I think Commons is both a service projects and a independent project, 
Commons is a free file repository and can be used in all MediaWiki site 
from version 1.13 or higher 
(source:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Instant_Commons ), so Commons is 
providing a service for more than 10.000 sites 
(http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sites_using_MediaWiki).  Commons is also 
a service project for Newspapers, magazines, other sites or things that 
needs images under a free license.  I don't think somebody on Commons 
would mind if you call it a service project in this context.

All Wikimedia project sites are build in MediaWiki so Commons provides 
them the same hosting service as the do for other MediaWiki sites, only 
the big difference is that the Foundation own the servers that host 
Commons and that the Wikimedia Foundation the only organization is that 
can use Commons for hosting non free images.

When we look inside Wikimedia we have Wikipedia, Wikibooks,Wiktionary, 
Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversety . Wikisource and Wikimedia 
Commons. Those nine projects all have there own scope and can work 
independent from the other projects, all the projects have there own 
community, policies, rules and content. When the Foundation will stop 
the could sell those projects to nine different people and all projects 
can keep working, the don't need a other project to keep existing. So 
all those project can be seen independently within the Foundation. The 
projects that stay over like Wikimania, Incubator or meta can be seen as 
projects with the soul purpose to support the nine big projects within 
the Foundation, Incubator can not work without other projects, Meta 
needs other projects to keep working also. Commons can go on with his 
own community, so does Wikipedia or Wikinews ect ect.

So we should see Commons as a inpendend project created for giving 
MediaWiki sites a free file repository, but optimized for giving extra 
service for Wikimedia projects.
  

Best regards,

Huib
* <http://www.wikipedia.org>*