Wikimedia Commons

Image credits.

All photographs and artworks are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under the licenses noted.

Files are stored locally in Filesource Creator License Forest City, Johor in Development, 2019, Jonestan CC by SA4, 0 Balaji Srinivasan Christiuhorten CC by SA4, 0 West Falesher Freed in Munster, 1648, Gerard Ter-Bork Public Domain Port of Roatan, Coxon Hole, 2025, Larry D. Moore CC by 4.

0 Ciamara Castro, 2023, Presidencia de Colombia Public Domain Peter Thiel Gage Skidmore CC by SAW 3.

Like you just need to get very good at like filters and searching an internet archive where you can find a lot of books with really great illustrations.

Then like Flickr, like Wikimedia Commons is really good.

They have a lot of images where there's kind of like, it's not exactly public domain, but it's like free access, like Creative Commons.

Flickr has some good ones.

So, what exactly is Wiki Loves Monuments? It is an annual international photography competition that invites both amateur and professional photographers to document historic sites, listed buildings, and other cultural heritage monuments.

The photographs are then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free license so that they can be used and shared as part of the world's free knowledge.

The international competition runs from September 1st to October 31st.

But here is something important to know.

Following discussions around trustee election rules, the governor's committee has said that some of the proposed changes need more work, while the foundation has also launched its 2026 trustee search for appointed seats.

Now, let's move from governors into the tools that editors usually use.

First, one of the new additions is Chart Wizard, which has been launched on Wikimedia Commons.

It allows editors to create structured bar and pie charts from raw data without having to manually write complicated JSON.

My ADHD kind of rolled me back out of film school and into Wikipedia, where I ended up working on the underlying software for the Wikimedia Foundation for a long time.

including a bunch of specialty work on the video platform, which has enabled Wikimedia Commons to store thousands of public domain films.

So when I became a regular on the Fediverse in the wacky social media sphere, I quickly discovered the Monstrodon watch party.

where every week we take a trashy movie and we just all watch it together and riff on it online.

A photograph preserved on Wikimedia Commons shows an unfinished commercial interior in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Patterned yellow walls, low ceiling tiles, worn-looking carpet, fluorescent fixtures, and openings into adjoining rooms.

The picture is associated with a 2002 Hobby Town renovation.

In May 2024, secondary reports, including Wisconsin Frights and The Ghost in My Machine, described a rediscovery trail leading to archived HobbyTown renovation pages.

Those pages included the recognizable yellow room photograph and other views of the renovation.

Wikimedia Commons now preserves the file as an image associated with a HobbyTown USA Oshkosh interior under construction.

The location is generally identified as a former furniture store space in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, renovated for a HobbyTown-related remote control racing facility sometimes discussed in connection with Revolution Raceway.

References to the address vary between adjoining portions of the Oregon Street property, so a precise street number should be treated cautiously.

yeah.

Yeah, for Wikipedia pages, for Wikidata, for Commons categories, I tried to look at those, and they also had this kind of a spike, and again, naturally, also a spike in edits, so I did my part in trying to figure out, even though I don't know a lot about the team and everything, but I tried to look into the Wikidata items, the Wikipedia articles, and fix any small mistakes or missing items that I could contribute, just to make it so that people who are looking for that information could find things in a better place, let's say.

Oh, nice.

Okay, great.

Back when I was a student, I had the I had a lot more free time to dedicate a lot to being active in the projects.

These days, I still am active, but in a more residual fashion.

The most that I do is organizing categories in Commons and Wikidata trees of connected items whenever some subject comes to my interest for a bit.

but apart from that i don't do uh that much especially coding because it's it's a bit more involved i i collect a lot of ideas and every now and then i might submit a few uh uh merge requests or two uh but most of my activity tends to be concentrated around those uh events so wikimania um in in 2000 actually it was in 2024 yeah that was in poland right that was one in poland

Who's, who's the person whose penis I'm seeing?

seeing?You are seeing the penis of somebody who took a picture of their penis and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons, which is the media repository which complements Wikipedia.

So Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

It's prose text.

There's a Wikimedia ecosystem of other projects.

So the text is managed in Wikipedia.

The images are managed in something called Wikimedia Commons.

So there was a, a person from the internet, and they created a Wikimedia account, and they had a picture of their, their penis on their phone or their computer.

So we've written 174 countries that have, that are easy to find pictures of this festival.

But if you're in Cape Verde trying to find this tiny little, a picture of this tiny little festival in Cape Verde, it is almost impossible on Wikimedia Commons or Shutterstock, you know, the places where you can find public domain pictures of these things.

So you have to be like, oh shit, I have to ask AI to make the picture.

And like, Oh, my God.

And so, you know, if you need, if you're looking for images, so the, the Library of Congress is one place.

You can also check Wikimedia Commons.

Okay.

They have a lot, but again, same deal.

He'd covered his expenses.

Okay.

Um, but then Wikimedia Commons said, "Well, hold on a minute.

Uh, he didn't take the photos.