[Foundation-l] Racism in Commons

Wed Dec 5 21:38:09 UTC 2007

George Herbert wrote:
> 2. An image on Commons *not* used on any project is... wrong.  Regardless of
> whether it's controversial or not.
> 
> I don't mind there being free image repositories.  It would not be a bad
> thing if the WMF formed one as a new project.  Commons, as it stands now, is
> specifically more focused on supporting the other projects.

This hasn't been true for over a year now---Commons is its own, separate 
project dedicated to hosting a repository of free images useful for some 
informational, historical, educational, etc. purpose. It's not expected 
that every single image on Commons will be used in a Wikipedia article 
somewhere... in particular a *very* common use of Commons is for the 
Wikipedia article to include one or two images of a subject, and a link 
to Commons for the rest of them. We have *dozens* of pictures of the 
Parthenon, for example, much more than any article on the Parthenon 
could possibly shove in... so many are unused except in the Commons 
gallery, which is just fine IMO.

-Mark