Commons *has* a community, though a small and vulnerable one, and
regretfully declining community over the last years. Currently some
twenty people contribute 100 edits or more a month, and some four
hundred people contribute 5 edits or more a month, which is comparable
to a "small" language Wikipedia. I thank Pieter Kuiper fully for
admitting Commons isn't without it's own problems. I thank Ting Cheng,
a community elected board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, for his
lengthy elaboration recognizing an issue. I thank Dror for standing up.
This Spring the WMF has initiated a year long strategy formation
process asking input from all sides and parties involved around a
series of questions concerning participation, reach and quality.
(Strict) compliance with license(s) is considered a [[[quality]] issue
by more than one regular contributor to Commons. Several image
gathering projects do have several goals, most notably informing the
public about free repositories of (for example) images which I will dub
[[reach]] and hooking newcomers to become contributors of content,
which I will dub [[participation]]. Initially dubbed [[governance of
Commmons]] I would like to invite all participants in this discussion,
and all participants in the [[massive upload conflict]]s to participate
this year, just started, and ending summer 2010, in the overall
Wikimedia Foundation strategy formation process. Help us all finding
answers to all of "What should we do" and "How should we do" questions.
In my belief all active participants to Commons should be give the time
to reflect on the current issue, and give their opinion, if they want
to, which can take a longer time than the wikibreak of Dror. Maybe it
might be possible to generate a rough guideline in a year time about
[[I started a project to have the public take images and upload them
ultimately to Commons. How and when should I inform the community at
commons about my project and under which conditions won't the community
at Commons block all uploads from my project]]. After all, the Commons
is a very special project. It has many more sysops than active
contributors. And, as far as I know, a sysop is just a technical
function, with the ability (some buttons) and not the authority to push
them without 'community consent'. Governance at he commons and
discussing about sysops might blur this a little bit. That might
presuppose sysops having an organizational role or function they
wouldn't have. And one last thing: Commons, like all projects, are
independent of the WMF, the Board of the WMF can't impose anything on
the project. So Ting showed a lot of courage by stepping into this
discussion, and I thank him for that, again.<br><font color="#888888"><br>Dedalus</font>