[Wikipedia-l] Behold the FIST

[Magnus Manske]

My "missing images" tool, a toolserver script to find free images to
use in WIkipedia articles by looking at what other langues have about
the topic, has been running for almost a year now, and was used ~42000
times.
Recently, I published "WatchFlickr", which does a very similar thing,
but searches free Flickr images.

Enter the FIST (Free Image Search Tool), a "unified" version of both
tools, and then some:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/fist.php

It has the known, now "merged" features:
* Follow language links and look if they have free images
* Look on Flickr for free images
I have added:
* Direct Wikimedia Commons search (results from the internal Commons search)
* GIMP-SAVVY (lots of PD images from the US Gov.)

Together with a truckload of options (scan title lists, categories to
depth X, replace placeholder images) and fine-tunings for the
individual searches, it is already likely to be one of the most
comprehensive free image (meta-)search tools on the web.

Please try it out, report bugs and feature requests (link in the
header bar), and throw lots'o'images at wikipedia articles :-)
Both Missing Images and WatchFlickr will eventually be "phased out"
and redirect to FIST.

If you know any other sources of free media, I'll be happy to add them, provided
* they have at least a few thousand images
* they have an API, to are easy to screen-scrape;-)

Cheers,
Magnus


P.S.: Sorry to spam wikipedia-l with this, but it seemed significant
to me, and the easiest way to reach wikipedians in all languages.