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Wikimedia Commons reaches 400,000 Files

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thats-a-lotta-wiki dept.

Brushen writes "Wikimedia Commons, a website built to be a repository of free, public domain, or GFDL images, sounds, and animations, has reached 400,000 files this week. Launched in September 2004 by the Wikimedia Foundation, the creators of Wikipedia, the organization intended for it to be a source of images that could be used in the rest of the organization's projects. As well, recently they've had a best picture comeptition."

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Impressive, but... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, many of the images are not original, in fact a large portion of them are public domain due to age or some other reason. But Wikimedia Commons is much better than Wikipedia with regard to inclusion of copyright violations. The vast majority of images on Wikimedia Commons are in fact public domain or under a free license.

  2. Don't forget other CC sources by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

    Flicker's CC material has over 8 million pictures now, all CC categories summarized. Even if you restrict yourself to the CC license subset Wikimedia uses, there's still more pictures on Flickr. However, Wikimedia possibly has a more "professional" set of pictures, rather than "here's me and my girlfriend on vacation" pictures, but with Flickr's powerful tagging system, I still recommend people looking for CC pictures suiting their license needs to check them out. I've found a surprising number of high quality photos there that suits Wikipedia perfectly, but keep in mind Wikipedia prefers CC material that is NOT restricted to non-commercial use only. When I use images from Flickr on Wikipedia, I usually use the most free license -- the Attribution license. Then it's a simple matter to attribute the picture with a link and author in the image description when you upload it.

    Of course, don't forget Google's Advanced Search which nowadays support searching for CC licenses material too. If you're still looking, Wikipedia's public domain resource list is another good starting point.

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  3. Re:They managed to... by Scarletdown · · Score: 2, Informative
    Given the symbolism of the time, the swan is probably intended to represent virgin purity.


    Nah. It just means that Zeus was a rather kinky fellow.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_and_the_Swan

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