Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a website owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, based on a wiki. 

Anybody can upload images, sounds, videos, and other multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons. The files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons are used by other Wikimedia Foundation projects, like Wikipedia or Wiktionary. For example, Wikipedia uses images on Wikimedia Commons to include pictures in their encyclopedia articles. The files can also be freely used by anyone else because they have free licenses.

Categories

Wikimedia Commons has categories, which are groups of files that have something in common or similar. For example, there is a category for pictures of cats. Wikimedia Commons is a multilingual website, meaning that it can be used in every language. However, some parts of Wikimedia Commons are only in English, like names of categories.

Sound files

Wikimedia Commons also has sound files. Not all of these are music. For example, there are recordings that read words out loud. These files are used in Wiktionary, a free dictionary, to teach people how to say words. For every file on Wikimedia Commons, the person who made it has to let everybody use it and change it as much as they want, including companies (see Creative Commons).


Statistics

Wikimedia Commons reached 10 million files on April 15, 2011.

 Improvements 
The Wikimedia Foundation was given money to make it easier for people to use their websites. They used some of this money to make the Upload Wizard, a new system for uploading files on Wikimedia Commons. People started using the UploadWizard in December 2010.

The Upload Wizard also teaches new uploaders about copyright law.  It has a tutorial for users to read so that they can check if the file they are uploading is violating copyright.  Most uploads are by the Upload Wizard.

Before, Wikimedia Commons only let people upload one file at a time. The Upload Wizard lets people upload multiple files at the same time and include all the required information about each one.

 Logo 
The logo of Wikimedia Commons has a red circle inside a blue circle. There are many small blue arrows pointing from the blue circle to the red circle in the middle, and one big blue arrow pointing upwards. The small blue arrows represent the different projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. The large arrow is to show that Wikimedia Commons is constantly improving.

This logo was chosen in a vote in 2004.

 References 

 Related pages 
 Wikimedia Commons
 Simple English version of the Main Page
 2004 logo vote
 Image sharing

Category:Wikimedia
Category:Wikis
Category:Free content
Category:Websites established in 2004