Research:A brief history of Wikimedia Commons

Created

22:36, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Contact

Peter B. Meyer

Independent

Collaborators

OrsolyaVirág

Independent

stalled

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Research:Projects

This page is an incomplete draft of a research project.
Information is incomplete and is likely to change substantially before the project starts.

The objective is to lay out a neutral history of Wikimedia Commons, identifying some key events and milestones, and drawing inferences related to the theory and legal history of "commons" in other contexts. We want to identify interactions with legal jurisdictions, e.g. (1) copyright law, (2) trademark constraints, (3) restrictions on subject (e.g. matters of decency) (4) file format. (.png, .svg,, .pdf, JSON, etc); and (5) differences across countries. Let's characterize how hard it is to manage, areas of disagreement, issues that have been hard to address, and the general pattern of success as usage has increased over time.

Wikimedia logo mosaic created to commemorate the one millionth file at Wikimedia Commons in 2006

Methods

Data

We can characterize the size of Commons over time, at least since the current site launched in 2004. We may be able to identify the number of contributors or admins at various points. These will support historical/qualitative conclusions.

• Draw data from Commons itself; its history pages, noticeboards, and village pump type conversation pages
• Use data from WMF's statistics
• Review the Signpost going all the way back (see Timeline below; move that )
• /Board-related meeting notes
• Secondary literature about Wikimedia
• Interview Commons admins or other observers or influencers, probably informally
• Track counts: Number of files; User counts? Admin counts? Admin criteria? Participation by country / file type?

Timeline

No scheduled activities now

• Key next steps: Gather data and do interviews, iteratively, and fill out the story linking with the Signpost collection. It's probably all public and updates can be recorded here.
• An easy next step might be to see if we can find counts of items in Commons from the Internet Archive

Policy, Ethics, and Human Subjects Research

• We will use public data and not disrupt the work of others except for occasional entirely optional interviews.

Drafts and submissions

• /Timeline of Commons -- Detailed
• /Draft 1 -- next steps, and academic bibliography

Submitted to the IASC conference to be held Oct 20-22, 2016. Their subject is the institutional and legal concept of commons, and implementations, often built around the work of Elinor Ostrom.

• /Source materials finished

Summary

Commons Growth, Michael F. Schönitzer and User:Kopiersperre, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Wikimedia Commons is a website that holds images and other media files for use in Wikipedia sites in any language. The site's design and rules allow uploading only of materials whose copyright status allows free reuse by anyone for any reason. This principle is enforced.

The site launched in 2004 and grew to have a million files in two years. It now holds 37 million items, including images of historical texts for transcription, and documentation in many languages. The Wikimedia Commons thus makes a cultural commons real, practical, and global.

This work describes how this repository began, evolved, offered new services, and grew. Its creators and administrators have debated issues including copyrights, fair use, what can be uploaded, matters of decency, file size, file format, categorization, and the definition and identities of users.

Design / methodology / approach

The main source of information is the primary source: the Commons site is a wiki which keeps past versions of pages, including discussions of its administrative policies and technical decisions back to its beginning. Each of its 243 administrators has a page, and there are pages for each past nomination of a potential administrator and the public support or opposition of other users. We shall interview administrators of the site.

Timeline of Commons

• 2004-03-19: Claim: "The Commons was originally proposed by Erik Möller" (Source: Commons:Project plan as of 19-11-2004)
• 2004-09-05: reference to Commons at a Board meeting, saying it'll need a database.
• The site launched 7 Sept 2004, using the MediaWiki software from the start.
• 2006: Commons reached a million files, it is said
• 2004-2013: All templates were written in wikitext and parser functions until Lua
• 2013: Lua began, perhaps not on Commons yet
• 2016: Some metadata was spun off from Commons and stored on Wikidata
• 2017: Structured Data on Commons (SDC) was introduced with tab? For Metadata
• 2019: {{Information}} template was rewritten in Lua to do lookup of metadata from "structured data on commons" (Wikidata)
• 2021: Automated copyright tracking by creator
• 2022: appearance of near alternatives - NC Commons - [2] Main Page of NC Commons
• 2026-04-12: WM Commons has "138,760,777 freely usable media files"

Findings

The Wikimedia Commons site is stable and has achieved its originally stated mission. Its contents are mostly photos and include also audio, video, historical texts, and scalable diagrams. Partnerships with cultural institutions have vastly expanded content and kept it organized. Museums, galleries, archives, and libraries upload materials to the Wikimedia Commons. This helps those institutions meet their mission, be visible to a global public, and indexes their materials in a searchable global category system.

The core site is run and developed by professionals at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Volunteers do most of the uploads and curation. Photo contests and other special events add content in focused ways. Automated "bots" help manage the overwhelming clerical tasks.

Intellectual property guidelines, mainly, determine which materials are suitable to be stored on the Commons. U.S. law applies generally, but the U.S. "fair use" doctrine does not earn materials a place on Commons because fair use materials are not freely reusable in other jurisdictions. People all over now routinely use materials from Wikimedia Commons in writings and presentations because, as intended, it frees them from worries about copyrights. To this extent, the site has succeeded in helping make real a set of a "free" unobstructed digital cultural materials.

Originality / value for knowledge commons research

We do not know of a simple, reliable cite-able history of the Wikimedia Commons, despite its importance. Therefore, this work is simple and descriptive, not mainly theoretical. A timeline and accounting of the past development, issues, and conflicts regarding the Wikimedia Commons can be useful to analysts of online phenomena and to scholars of knowledge commons and intellectual property.

Results

Hoped-for results: The legal literature on commons refers only rarely to Wikimedia Commons because the relevant scholars do not have clear historical references points, and do not all understand that Wikimedia Commons, a major site, even exists or what copyright issues it has confronted in fact. If they knew, they could integrate the experiences of Wikimedia Commons into more legal and analytical literature.