Commons:Community portal

Community Portal

Village Pump (copyright & proposals)

Help Desk (Upload help)

Administrators' Noticeboard (vandalism, user problems, blocks and protections)

Graphics Lab

Welcome to the Wikimedia Commons community portal

Are you new to Wikimedia Commons? Welcome! Check out what we're all about (and what we are not), or just start searching for images or other media files. You can find collections of similar files grouped by topic or by almost any other characteristic you can think of. You can even start contributing to the project in important ways, regardless of your abilities or interests, and no matter where you live or what language you speak. All information about Commons itself is available in English, and most of it is available in other languages.

News

Variatie (ship, 1949)

"Ships by name"-category covers 20,000 ships

One year after the 10,000th ship, the 20,000th subcategory for an individual ship is created: Category:Variatie (ship, 1949).

Commons provides consistently named categories with basic information on vessels, many of which don't have Wikipedia articles yet. Several "by" subcategories of Category:Ships allow to find vessels (and images of vessels) with different criteria.

Participants aim to identify ships by name (20,000 by now), year of completion (97%), flag, type/function, IMO or ENI, country of construction (58%), etc. The 20,000 categories include ca. 100,000 images in their main category. 33% of these images are used at Wikipedia.

See: Category:Ships by name, Category:Unidentified ships, New ships

Tropical Depression Seventeen-W

Over 15 million files uploaded

Wikimedia Commons now has over 15 million files as of December 4, 2012. 17W Aug 14 1996 0124Z.png is a file depicting Tropical Depression Seventeen-W on August 14, 1996 is a candidate to be the 15,000,000th file.

The actual file is often difficult to identify due to the fact that many files are loaded at almost the same time, and that a number need to be deleted to maintain the integrity of the repository. This image was created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States.

previous Wikimedia Commons news...

Communications

Help desk

For questions about how to use Commons.

Village pump

Ask questions about features, problems you may have, or policy. Similar pages are available in several other languages.

Centralized discussion

List of ongoing discussions on policies, guidelines or other matters that have a wide impact.

Graphic Lab

A place where you can request wikigraphists to improve, clean up, or color your images.

Administrators' noticeboard

If you need to communicate with an administrator, for example regarding blocks and protections.

IRC channels

#wikimedia-commons Wikimedia Commons IRC channel

#commons.wikimedia to follow the recent changes on IRC.

#cvn-commons shows possible vandalism

#cvn-commons-uploads shows new uploads

International mailing-list

commons-l (this month)

Bugzilla

Bugzilla: Commons (last 7 days) bug reports and feature requests

Upload on the go! Get our mobile app:

Policies and decisions

Wikimedia Commons project scope

The project definition and its derived detailed policy pages on licensing, allowed copyright tags and file types give you important information what we are and what not.

Deletion policy

The deletion policy is closely related to the Wikimedia Commons project scope. They define when and how to delete content that does not belong in Wikimedia Commons for various reasons.

Multilingualism

Wikimedia Commons is multilingual. Use Babel in order to find contributors who speak your language. Please add information about the languages you understand to your user page. The language policy is discussed at Commons talk:Language policy.

User's Graphics abilities

Categorizes users by graphic and audio knowledge, abilities or interest on Commons, in order to ease finding help in any area of media expertise. (Part of the Commons 2.0 project)

Administrators

List of administrators and votes on adminship requests.

All policies and guidelines...

Recommendations and tutorials

Help index

All help, project, maintenance, discussion, policy pages and further tutorials about how to work in wikis like Wikimedia Commons are listed there. For an overview over the structure of the Wikimedia Commons project itself see Category:Commons.

Software

Recommended software for each media type in order to create and edit the content you want to share at Wikimedia Commons.

Tools

Tools for uploading and further maintenance of Wikimedia Commons as for example Commonist for uploading large numbers of images. Tool integration helps you add functionality to your Wikimedia Commons web interface.

How to use Wikimedia Commons' content

Overview on how to embed Wikimedia Commons content into various Wikimedia wikis and how to reuse Commons' content by third parties. See also the media help for software and hints how to watch images and films and listen to audio files provided by Wikimedia Commons. See Featured pictures, Valued images, Picture of the day and Media of the day for particularly valuable content you can reuse.

Content organization

Creation and Upload

Picture requests, Free media resources for uploads to the Wikimedia Commons

Improvements

• Featured picture candidates, Valued image candidates and Quality images candidates, picture of the day and media of the day
• Unidentified subjects, like plants, people or animals that need to be identified.
• Images for cleanup, Transition to SVG of flags and graphics
• Categories for discussion, Uncategorized pages, Uncategorized categories, Uncategorized Media, Orphan pages, Orphan images

Copyright issues

• Deletion requests, Candidates for speedy deletion
• Copyright and licensing questions

Wikimedia Commons sub projects

Commons:Geocoding for adding geographic location information to media, Commons:Stroke Order Project and more WikiProjects.

Wikimedia Commons templates

Commons:Templates