Commons:One million files

This page is presently inactive and retained primarily for historical interest. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you may try using the talk page (though your voice may not be heard) or start a discussion at the Village pump.

This page is to reflect and commemmorate on reaching the milestone of 1 million uploaded files. Currently there are: 105,425,827 files.

Press release to go here: Commons:Press releases/1M

The idea is to collect testimonials from current members of the community, as an informal "snapshot" of where we are at the moment, which will no doubt prove interesting to look back on in the future and may also prompt more philosophical thought about the state of the community right now.

Things to think about:

• The past
  • What issues have been important in the formation of the Commons community?
  • What issues have shaped it?
  • Involvement level at Commons vs other Wikimedia wikis
• The future - how can we manage these issues?
  • Massive growth increase - new users, new files
  • Development of dedicated meta-editors -- cleanup and license/source checking
  • File organisation and structure (aka... categories vs galleries)
  • Multilinguality - admin community, translation of help pages, could a monolingual editor survive?
  • Structured searchable (?) data
  • Other technical challenges, realities and dreams
  • How confident can we be that our contents are actually free? Can we ever be confident?
  • How can we better support new users? niche communities - photographers, SVG editors, flag editors
  • How do we compare to other popular systems such as flickr?
  • When (if ever) is it appropriate to say our project scope is to create a free media stock archive, as opposed to just serving the Wikimedia projects?
  • ...

Please help me translate this page and template!! Encourage people who you know help build and maintain this community, to write a little something.

Add your testimonial

Do you consider yourself a member of the Commons community? Create a subpage under your username, and then {{transclude}} it at /Testimonials. You can use template:testimonial like this:

{{testimonial|myusername|My history at the Commons|FilesomeoneelseuploadedIlike.jpg|Why I like this image|What I think about the future for the Commons|Myfavouriteselfupload.jpg|Why I like this file that I uploaded}}

Using "subst" will make it easy to tweak it to your liking. See for example /Example.

Type your username here (WITHOUT the User: prefix):

Testimonials

User:Example

My history at Commons I first came to the Commons when I realised the serious dearth of fair use files that were being submitted here. Since then, I have embraced the challenge of being blocked by as many different language-speaking admins as possible. So far from the top 20 I am only missing Hebrew and Arabic. Portugese was also a challenge but I found a spot of wiki-stalking soon solved that. My favourite upload (others) This is my favourite image because there simply aren't enough userboxes out there. Firefox has had its day... now is the time for the ice weasel!!!!!!!

The future Definitely the biggest challenge will be persuading Jimmy et al about the huge benefits of NC ND licenses and the need for universal fair use. I plan to implement this by a pattern of stealth licensing: uploading fair use files and picking licenses at random. Eventually they will realise resistance is futile and embrace fair use for all. My favourite upload (mine) I uploaded a copy of Goatse here, but someone deleted it. Fascists. Nevertheless, this remains a masterly work of non-horizontal text alignment that I think everyone can take something away from.