Vorige week kreeg ik een mailtje van een van de mailinglisten van Wikimedia. Dat ging over het bereiken van 2 miljoen bestanden op WikiMediaCommons. Hieronder citeer ik de hele mail over dit feit:

I am happy to relay that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million
files. This is around 11 months after we reached one million. Since
March 2007 we routinely have over 100,000 files uploaded every single
month. It is becoming more and more common to have over 5,000 files in
a single day.

Persbericht

This is not much of a traditional press release but will be
interesting for Wikimedians who are not closely involved with Commons
(and maybe those who are, too). It lists some recent innovations and
tools that we have introduced to improve the quality and ease of
access of the Commons collection.

I expect most people here are aware of the Picture of the Year
competition, and Quality Images, and the Mayflower search engine (Mayflower), and the improved Ogg video/audio playback thanks to Tim Starling.

A couple of features people may not be aware of:
– geocoding – every picture that is geotagged gets a little “Earth”
icon and clicking on it launches a map that shows the image located on
the map, as well as other geotagged images nearby. It’s really cool.
The geocoding folk are very innovative and welcoming so if you are
interested in helping them out or just finding out other cool ways
this can be used, please talk to them.

Geotagging

– category RSS feeds – thanks to Magnus Manske each category now has a
RSS feed for new files that get added to that category. If you are
interested in some topic X and it has a category, you can keep tabs on
what new files get added to it without having to go to Commons to
check all the time. Just add the RSS feed link (it’s on the category
page under the toolbox) to your favourite feed reader.
A full list of types of feeds available is here:

Feeds

The 2M mark draws some comparison with English Wikipedia which
recently passed the same milestone. However the comparison is not
really valid. Where Wikipedia may expect basically one topic == one
article (give or take section expension such as ‘History of X’ having
its own article instead of just ‘X’), Commons would hope to have one
topic == dozens of files.

Commons is still a very young project and it is both exciting and
scary to imagine what it will be like with 10M files.

By #files we are the largest project. 😉
By #users we are the 8th largest project.
By #edits we are the 9th largest project.

It is a very interesting time to be involved with Commons. We face
many social and technical problems that are yet to be resolved. Are
our current processes for dealing with things (eg: uploading, tagging
as copyvio, deletion discussion, deletion, adminship) scaling well –
will they continue to cope or will they get overloaded? How can we
face the joint challenges of welcoming new users on one hand and yet
tackling the never-ending stream of copyvios on the other? How can we
provide equal opportunity for our users to participate regardless of
the languages they do or don’t speak?

The social problems are ours to ponder, yet I can’t help feeling that
our work is made more difficult by using inappropriate tools.
MediaWiki is a great tool for writing an encyclopedia in a single
language, but it has some significant shortcomings when used in a
multilingual media-based environment that only become more problematic
as Commons gets larger. Therefore I sincerely hope that the Foundation
will consider hiring or contracting developers specifically for
problems that affect Commons, within the next couple of years.

regards,
Brianna

Tot zover het citaat.