Slashdot Mirror
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."
...find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.
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How many of the media files have been taken despite being under copyright? I've seen the obvious and/or controversial images removed -- pretty promptly in most cases. But how about an image taken from a website with no watermark taken from a website where the webmaster has no time to pursue misappropriation.
Although if they truly have 400 000 original images that have been validly released for them to use, more power to them.
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Now there will be 100k more files, of which 99k are called hello.jpg ;)
Slashdot couldn't overwhelm their servers even if they wanted to. They get a LOT more traffic than Slashdot does.
400,000 files seems like an awful lot of licenses to verify. Having said that, this is a real boon to graphic artists, 3D animators and the like. Gotta love that CC license.
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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.
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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