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

[Michael Peel]

On 16 Jun 2009, at 18:56, Geoffrey Plourde 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.
>
> Unfortunately, I can not fathom any reason that Commons should be  
> or is a independent project in its own right. It would be like  
> making all the filing cabinets in an office their own division.

I produce images for Commons in an analogous way to producing text  
for Wikipedia. I don't expect all of the images that I upload to  
Commons will be used in Wikimedia projects. I do hope that they will  
be useful for projects/education/life in general, though, both within  
Wikimedia and without.

Wikipedia itself can be regarded as a service project - it is  
providing content/a service for other projects. Fundamentally, we are  
about making content/information available freely to everyone. I  
think that Commons (and wikisource) does this as well as any other  
project (although of course they do this more effectively in  
combination than separately). Commons does however provide multimedia  
for Wikipedia. Hence I view it both as a project in its own right and  
a service project, but primarily the former.

Mike