Connecting the Commons: Shared Benefits for Wikimedia Commons and CommonsDB

Wikimedia Sverige is participating in the CommonsDB project because the concept of a registry of rights information on public domain and openly licensed images holds enormous potential for the Wikimedia Commons community—the people building and maintaining the Wikimedia movement’s vast media repository. Such a registry could support both the upload of new media and the preservation of the more than 100 million files already hosted on the platform.

Wikimedia Commons – A Vast and Growing Media Repository

For over two decades, the Wikimedia movement has operated Wikimedia Commons, a central media repository serving all its projects. Over the years, it has grown to encompass more than 100 million files, from public domain images shared by archives and museums to original contemporary works released under open licenses. Managing a collection of this scale is no small task. Even with good-faith contributors, duplicates appear—sometimes unintentionally and sometimes because a higher-quality or higher-resolution version has been found.

A registry capable of identifying files by their visual content could play a vital role in preventing duplication and improving the accuracy and quality of Wikimedia Commons. As part of our collaboration with the experienced Wikimedia Commons community to explore this potential, we produced this short introductory video along with a context-setting blog post:

Potential benefits for the Wikimedia Commons community include the ability to:

• Verify which copyright applies to content from other parties.
• Automate license selection during upload, eliminating the need for the user to choose manually.
• Identify errors in previously image uploads, such as versions released under a Creative Commons license when they are actually in the public domain.
• Detect duplicate files—images uploaded multiple times unintentionally and missed due to minor variations.
• Find visually similar images that are not duplicates but should be grouped in the same category, such as different restorations of the same work.

The Wikimedia Commons community has been invited to help assess whether these early ideas for how the CommonsDB registry could benefit them are on the right track—and, if so, to explore the best ways to integrate it. They are also encouraged to suggest additional, value-adding uses we may not have considered.

We hope these ideas inspire you to consider how the CommonsDB registry could add value to your work. Get in touch at hello@commonsdb.org.