Open Access Wikipedia Challenge

This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.

Wikimedia Commons [Oct. 17, 2012, 8:02 p.m.]


video

OBSERVE

clippings from 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome

 

What is Wikimedia Commons?

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on theproject scope pages.

Wikimedia Commons uses the same wiki-technology as Wikipedia and everyone can edit it. Unlike media files uploaded to other projects, files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons can be embedded on pages of all Wikimedia projects without the need to separately upload them there.

Launched on 7 September 2004, Wikimedia Commons hit the 1,000,000 uploaded media file milestone on 30 November 2006 and currently contains 14,452,692 files and 107,347 media collections. More background information about the Wikimedia Commons project itself can be found in the General disclaimer, at the Wikipedia page about Wikimedia Commons and its page in Meta-wiki.

Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page. The Wikimedia Commons database itself and the texts in it are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. More information on re-use can be found at Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia and Commons:First steps/Reuse.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:FAQ

 

What licenses do the files I upload have to use?

You have to make sure that anything you upload is either in the public domain or under some free license such as GNU Free Documentation License or CC-BY/BY-SA (for more see Commons:Licensing and Commons:Copyright tags). Please do not invent licenses out of thin air. Most things on the Internet are copyrighted. Don't assume otherwise unless you have a good reason. When publishing your own work, you can release your work into the public domain ({{PD-self}}), or under specific licenses: {{self|license name}}, {{self|license 1|license 2}} etc. Or you can choose one of the options from the drop-down menu license selector at Special:Upload under "own work".

Why doesn't the Commons include fair use content?

Categories:

 

Category structure in Wikimedia Commons

The category structure is (ideally) a multi-hierarchy with a single root category, Category:CommonsRoot.

  • All categories (except CommonsRoot) should be contained in at least one other category
  • There should be no cycles (i.e. a category should not contain itself, directly or indirectly).
  • The category structure should reflect a hierarchy of concepts, from the most generic one down to the very specific.
  • Category:Topics - This category is the global common root of the media files categorized by the TOPIC. ALL media files should be categorized under this category for the sake of allowing others to find them by topic. Topical categories shouldn't be included through templates.
  • Category:Copyright statuses - This category is the global common root of the media files categorized by the LICENSE. ALL media files should be categorized under this category with the appropriate license tag. This type of category is added by including it in the templates.
  • Category:Image sources - This category is the global common root of the media files categorized by the SOURCE, where they come from (books, collections, sites, etc.). This type of category is generally added by template.
  • Category:Media types - This category is the global common root of the media files categorized by the Media TYPE. Please note that this type of categorization is sometimes omitted for images, since the vast majority of files on the commons are images of some sort.
  • Category:Commons - This category is the global common root of categorizing Commons' maintenance tasks and pages (Commons:-, and Help:-) except for media files. The translated pages in each language should be categorized under their language categories, using the "Category:Commons-ISO-LANGUAGE-CODE" style. The structure of Category:Commons-en is the sample hierarchy for every other language sub category. Do not use two colons in category or page names. See this discussion and Help:Namespaces. There is a sub category Category:Commons maintenance content, which is for the special maintenance of Wikimedia Commons' global common contents and which does not get translated.　ALL media files should be categorized under the first 4 categories below, but ONLY files having problems and needing to be fixed should also be in the sub-category Category:Commons maintenance content.
  • Just browse through categories a bit

DO

Your task is to add categories to 3 media files on Commons. Log in to commons (enable global log-in if necessary). The easiest way to add or modify categories is to use HotCat which, by default, needs to be enabled in Preferences.