Wikimedia Commons breaks the 5,000,000 file mark

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Hot on the heels of the recent milestone of 3,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has just lodged its own major milestone: passing the 5,000,000 binary mark.  Wikimedia Commons is the vast image, video, sound, illustration (and more) repository of works that can be freely reused by anyone, and perhaps most notably to users is the space where all of Wikipedia’s images are stored.  Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet.
And the 5,000,000th file?  Although it’s tough to pinpoint, contributors on Commons seem to have agreed that a digital scan (at right) of the 1838 Danish news paper Kjøbenhavnsposten, is the winner, uploaded by User:Saddhiyama.
Wikimedia UK, the international chapter based in the United Kingdom, marked the occasion with an announcement and other chapters and volunteers around the world are celebrating this major milestone.  News also came from the Dutch chapter.
Commons is made possible by the work of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world, in over 250 languages.  Contributors upload free or public domain images, enhance and improve older scanned files, provide detailed illustrations, and increasingly upload free video and sound files.
The Foundation is looking forward to expanding usability of the Commons projects, thanks in large part to a recent grant from the Ford Foundation.
Congratulations to the Commoners on the Commons!
Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Compliments and I am very happy.
Is any list of how many articles are written in other languages.

[…] From the Blog Post: Wikimedia Commons has just lodged its own major milestone: passing the 5,000,000 binary mark. Wikimedia Commons is the vast image, video, sound, illustration (and more) repository of works that can be freely reused by anyone, and perhaps most notably to users is the space where all of Wikipedia’s images are stored. Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet. […]

[…] Wikimedia Commons breaks 5,000,000 files Hot on the heels of the recent milestone of 3,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has just lodged its own major milestone: passing the 5,000,000 binary mark. Wikimedia Commons is the vast image, video, sound, illustration (and more) repository of works that can be freely reused by anyone, and perhaps most notably to users is the space where all of Wikipedia’s images are stored. Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet. […]

Please be more careful with the files. Even with more than five million, it’s important not to break them. Thank you.

🙂

Nice to have something valuable for a 5 millionth file than a junk.

Hi there,
Congratulations are in order. Although my comment is more for a previous entry on the blog.
http://diff.wikimedia.org/2009/04/16/first-preliminary-results-from-unu-merit-survey-of-wikipedia-readers-and-contributors-available/
There hasn’t been an update of that blog entry nor has there been an update to that blog post on the site mentioned http://www.wikipediastudy.org/ after the initial report.

This is a valuable service. Many people think everything on the web is in the public domain. No there is a source on the web with items in the public domain. This a great source for people and I am sure it took a great deal of time and effort.

congrats, great resource and library of useful references

The page says “And the 5,000,00th file?”
It’s missing a zero at the end.

@Person – whoops, thanks, fixed!

“Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet.”
I would. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/) hosts more than 15 million CC-BY and more than 10 million CC-BY-SA files, all of which are free by the definition used on Commons.
Commons is great, but we’re not quite there yet.

Keep going. Great achievement.

is a great thing keep it up.