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

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Just because people put things into a filing cabinet does not endow the filing cabinet with any special powers. I also am not disputing the relative importance of free content repositories.




________________________________
From: Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 11:13:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons: Service project or not?

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Commons is an oddball project. Other projects produce work, but Commons
> stores it. Wikisource could be considered another oddball for the same
> reason. At this point in time, I would class Commons as a service project
> (and wikisource as well) because it provides a service to other projects and
> its only point is to provide a service to other projects.
>

You are ignoring the efforts of the photographers, graphic artists,
restorationists and free image sleuths that consider building the archive at
Commons as their primary goal.  There is a great deal of content added and
maintained in Commons that is uploaded with no particular WMF use in mind.
An organizaed and well-documented free content repository -- for use by the
wider world -- is valuable regardless of whether the works it contains
happen to be used by the WMF.

-Robert Rohde
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