CommonsDB
Welcome to CommonsDB!
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
That is the Wikimedia Movement's commitment.
There are probably billions of images that are in the public domain or freely licensed. Checking whether an image is either of those can be tedious work, especially when encountering it on the web where the available metadata is lacking.
The goal of CommonsDB is to create a reliable and accessible infrastructure for identifying and verifying the rights status of digital content. This will be achieved by building a registry that enables users to verify the rights status of content from multiple sources, using existing technologies and standards, such as ISCC codes, rights metadata, and verifiable credentials, and makes registry information easily accessible through public APIs.
Such possibilities has potential for a number of benefits for the Wikimedia Commons community, such as:
- Verify which copyright applies to content from other parties
- Possibly also useful during upload so that the user does not have to choose a license manually
- Find errors in already uploaded images (for example, versions of images that have been uploaded under a Creative Commons license even though the image is without copyright)
- Find duplicate files - files that have been uploaded multiple times without intention (and got away with it through minimal variations in the image)
- Find images that are very similar to each other (but are not duplicates) and should be in the same category (for example, restorations)
- This could be a solution for the German implementation of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive (i.e. that you cannot "copyright censor" an image that has been proven to be without copyright)
Read about the potentential in depth.
- Wikimedia Sverige's project page (in Swedish)