Well I suppose that on some level the people who upload those images believe them to be artistic in some way. After looking at most of the artist categories of the 17th century, I have noticed that it's generally the tits-and-ass images that find their way on to Wikipedia first. I myself have uploaded a few for lesser known artists for whom only those images were available at the time. Now, a few years later I am surprised to find that many of those artists were pretty good landscapists or still-life painters as well.
As far as what percentage of Wikimedia Commons pictures are actually used in sister projects, no idea, but I suspect it's less than 50%
On May 23, 2013, at 11:27 PM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
On 05/23/2013 02:58 PM, Jane Darnell wrote:
How strange that people take the trouble to upload those!
I've been wondering about this myself. Why do people port collections of images from Flickr CC to Commons in the first place? If someone really needed a weird nude picture for an article, they could still find it at Flickr and import it then. (This might be part of my bias that WC is supposed to support other projects and not be an inclusive repo of all CC content in the world.) Indeed, I wonder what percentage of WC resources is not used by an affiliated project?