Commons is an oddball project. Other projects produce work, but Commons stores it. Wikisource could be considered another oddball for the same reason. At this point in time, I would class Commons as a service project (and wikisource as well) because it provides a service to other projects and its only point is to provide a service to other projects. Unfortunately, I can not fathom any reason that Commons should be or is a independent project in its own right. It would be like making all the filing cabinets in an office their own division. ________________________________ From: Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 8:41:49 AM Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons: Service project or not? OK, the question has popped up so many times, that I think it would only be fair to give it a separate topic on this list :) Now I'd like to have a discussion about this, and not just assumptions. Let's not be childish and say "yes it is, no it's not" (which some of the discussion comes down to) but lets play around a bit with arguments. This discussion is btw not new at all, I remember to have discussed over it several times, and I've had both opinions probably in time. Mostly this discussion comes up when a project (in the past at least several times this was the Dutch Wikipedia, as some might remember) felt that the commons community was damaging the content they uploaded there without them having a say over it. The even more important question is, however, when comes the moment when the two are in conflict? I doubt any project actually cares whether commons has out of scope images (well, a few might, but that is actually commons people then imho, not wikipedians/wikisourcians etc), not what the categorization is like. As long as it works, they can upload their stuff, it is safe, and they can use it. The problems often came when a few "bad people" (paraphrasing it as it was received by the Dutch Wikipedians at the time, no insult intended) were damaging their content (at the time, it was for example about Coat of Arms-png's being deleted) and they felt not heard or helped by others. I think that is currently a repeating pattern in some way. A smaller group, with all best intentions, decides to "harm" a collection of content, and people feel attacked by that, and react in a not-so-positive way. That is where the service project and the independent project clash. Were it merely service, the commons would abide the wish of the wikipedians (wikisourcians etc), were it independent, the Wikipedians would have bad luck and live with it. So now please share with me, in those conflict situations, which should it be, and, most importantly, why? I'll believe service project is great in ideal situations, as would be independent, as long as everything goes fine. But in these border cases? eia _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I thought a bit more about the issue, and I think there is a point we (possibly all of us) are missing. Actually, Commons must be not just a depository, it can also play an active role within WMF projects. Let me give an example. More than a year ago I uploaded this file: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentation_church_Borisoglebsky.jpg which I used to illustrate an article on ru.wp on the town where the church is located. (In the meanwhile, about 10 other pictures of the same town have been uploaded). I see now that articles about the town exist in four Wikipedias, en, fr, ru, and fi. fi.wp article uses this image since it has been apparently created after the file was uploaded. en and fr articles do not use any images at all for illustration: apparently, they have been created before I uploaded the image, and I was too lazy to insert images in these articles even though I speak both English and French. Now since I have noticed this I will of course do it myself, but generally this could be difficult: imagine an article with 10 interwikis, some of them in languages I have no idea of like Japanese. This is of course a meta issue and somebody (me for instance) could take an initiative and create a project alerting other wikipedias of new image arrivals (I vaguely remember we even had a script like this which was very helpful in adding images), but I guess it would be a natural task for Commons. Another example - actively searching for images and uploading them: for instance, approaching users living in certain areas, searching for PD images of works of art etc. May be I am just ignorant and all these things are already going on, but then it is strange that I have never heard of them being an active editor and being in principle interested in meta issues. To conclude there is definitely a room for an active role for Commons, not just as a passive file depository. Cheers Yaroslav