Wikimedia Commons reaches 400,000 Files

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."

Comments

Re:Quick!

[Professor_UNIX]

If we /. the wikimedia servers, we can start another fund drive! Who wants to hear another personal appeal from Jimbo?

Slashdot couldn't overwhelm their servers even if they wanted to. They get a LOT more traffic than Slashdot does.

Come on CmdrTaco, SpellCheck Isn't Hard

[Anonymous Coward]

...best picture comeptition."

Taco, is it really that hard to correct "comeptition" to "competition"?

You are supposedly an editor, yet you can't even be bothered to use a spellcheck?

I know he says this doesn't matter on slashdot and that it is just minutiae, but most people would say it does matter a great deal. This site is run by paid editors, it is long past time they act like it.

More royalty free pics, lucky corporate media orgs

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as a photographer I'm not sure I welcome this. Yeah, Adobe has entered the royalty free sector, for cheap-ass business users looking for cheesy pics of people in suits shaking hands. That was never a market I competed in. Wikipedia worries me because well funded media organisations are going to stop paying for real photographers to do stuff like "we need a picture of Barcelona for a travel story". Oh, get a wikimedia image, pay nobody, increase value add for our shareholders. And I guess I don't care about that either because I don't have any pictures of Barcelona. And there are no serious ethical issues of working in Barcelona. But for stuff I do have, like a refugee camp someplace quite logistically hard to get to or work in, or for a picture of the leader of this rebel group, or of a soccer team in a war zone. Is this sort of thing better when it's taken by a kid who doesn't speak the language who's just left college and is doing the peace corps thing, and decides to donate all this holiday snaps to wikimedia(though the pics are lowish resolution and miscaptioned). Or should that kind of thing be done by AP or Reuters who employ (for example) someone in the refugee camp who knows what's going on. Or by independent foreign journalists with their own set of biases? Yeah, we should all adapt to the market, worse is better, etc. I'm watching people who are cross subsidising photography with other income sources eat away at my market, and I don't like it.

Re:Impressive, but...

[timeOday]

How many of the media files have been taken despite being under copyright?

Anybody with a collection of anything can get sued in a dispute over whether they actually own something. That's not a problem affects free licenses in particular. The same holds whether you have a collection of files (whether free or commercially licensed), a museum (works have long and twisted histories), own a newspaper (journalists sometimes plagiarize), or run a pawn shop (people might sell you stolen goods).

So I have no particular concern for Wikipedia.

Re:They managed to...

[pdiaz]

grammer? or grammar?. Ahh, the irony...

Re:More royalty free pics, lucky corporate media o

[Lord_Dweomer]

Ok....so you've expressed your displeasure with the current market forces, you admit you need to adapt to the new situation...what do you plan on doing about it? You seem to be almost trying to argue that it is not ethically right for some peace corps college kid to upload his pictures because it deprives you of revenue...or maybe I just read that wrong.