Wikimedia Commons Archive

  • Fig. 1: Temporal evolution of the ratio of media files on Wikimedia Commons per active participant and evolution of the ratio of articles on the English-language Wikipedia.

    Temporal evolution of the content & participants of Wikimedia Commons

    Posted on March 28, 2010 | No Comments
    As part of the Multimedia Usability project, I am doing a lot of research to better understand how Wikimedia Commons is functioning, and particularly to understand the users & participants of Wikimedia Commons. One side that is of particular interest in my opinion is the demographics and the content dynamics of Commons.

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    digiKam, the perfect tool for Wikimedia Commons photographers?

    Posted on September 22, 2009 | 7 Comments
    For several years now, I have been a photographer for Wikimedia Commons. Commons is actually the reason why I became interested in photography, and why I bought a DSLR camera and various lenses. And I have ended up taking a lot of pictures. The problem when you take a lot of pictures is that the time you need then to process and upload them grows exponentially. Besides, if you want to upload your pictures to several platforms (say, Commons, flickr and your blog), you have to deal with the specifics of each website. It would be much simpler and faster to describe, tag, classify, geotag the pictures only once (using an appropriate batch-editing tool) and then to have each website extract the metadata, or to use an upload tool that extracts them automatically.

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    Ten features that would dramatically improve Wikimedia Commons

    Posted on June 30, 2009 | 6 Comments
    About two years ago, I said "Commons may be the next coolest project, as soon as developers find the time to improve its usability to make it more user-friendly". Wikimedia Commons hasn't evolved much in terms of usability since then. MIT's Technology Review recently published an article about improvements to come regarding the management of video content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia websites. I heard a lot of people say: "Good, but what about pictures?" Some technical improvements described by the Technology Review will be useful for both images and videos, such as the media and upload wizard currently developed by Michael Dale. However, Wikimedia Commons still needs many little (or big) features that would dramatically improve its user-friendliness.

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  • Panning de Nicolas Sarkozy en meeting à Toulouse

    Found on flickr, reused from Commons

    Posted on September 14, 2007 | 2 Comments
    Some months ago, I was asked permission to reuse one of my photos of Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French President, that I had taken during his rallye in Toulouse. The photo was printed on the cover of a newsletter issued by think tank in London called the Stockholm Network. They contacted me via flickr but I told them to credit me via Wikimedia Commons instead, where the photos also were. I am now being contacted by someone working for Community Connection News Magazine, "a minority print media publication company based out of Milwaukee, WI and serving the tri-state area" who's interested in a picture of school bus from Québec.

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