Commons:Press releases/1000FP

Wikimedia Commons celebrates one thousand Featured Pictures

Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org), the multilingual free-content media repository managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, has reached the milestone of 1,000 Featured Pictures. Featured Pictures are nominated and voted on by the wiki community, and represent "the best of the best" in free content images and photography.

The tradition of voting for Featured Pictures began in November 2004, two months after Wikimedia Commons was founded. The milestone comes as the memory of passing the two millionth file milestone is still fresh (two weeks earlier).

The 1000th Featured Picture

• Neuschwanstein Castle
• 
  A photochrom print of the front of Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany taken as few as ten years after the completion of the castle's construction. ca. 1890-1905. (Public domain)

Its nomination for Featured Picture is here.

Neuschwanstein Castle is one of Germany's most popular tourist destinations. This image was sourced from the Library of Congress, the de facto national library of the United States and a popular source for historically significant works -- over 5,000 of Wikimedia Commons' files have been sourced from the Library of Congress. Photochrom is a colorizing process combining photography and color lithography. It typifies the aesthetics of "postcard pictures". The process was most popular in the 1890s, when color photography was first being developed but commercially impractical.

Featured Picture statistics

Just under half of the total Featured Pictures ( totalled at 1,013) are created by Wikimedians. Popular "outside" sources for free content imagery include US government federal department websites (such as NASA), and Flickr.

Breakdown by filetype:

• JPG - 937 - 92.5%
• SVG - 40 - 3.9%
• PNG - 24 - 2.4%
• GIF - 12 - 1.2%

(SVGs and PNGs are spread over Maps, Computer-generated and Non-photographic media.)

Totals by month

The largest number passed in a single month was 78 in June 2007. The average number passed is 29 per month (from 2004-11 to 2007-09).

2004-11 - 4
2004-12 - 9
2005-01 - 18
2005-02 - 21
2005-03 - 28
2005-04 - 19
2005-05 - 59
2005-06 - 26
2005-07 - 35
2005-08 - 31
2005-09 - 45
2005-10 - 22
2005-11 - 17
2005-12 - 18
2006-01 - 34
2006-02 - 30
2006-03 - 20
2006-04 - 21
2006-05 - 23
2006-06 - 42
2006-07 - 24
2006-08 - 27
2006-09 - 27
2006-10 - 24
2006-11 - 28
2006-12 - 25
2007-01 - 30
2007-02 - 19
2007-03 - 25
2007-04 - 24
2007-05 - 51
2007-06 - 78
2007-07 - 36
2007-08 - 46
2007-09 - 31
2007-10 - 44+

Meet our photographers

Commons:Meet our photographers was started in May 2007 as a way of highlighting Wikimedians who had made extensive and outstanding contributions to Wikimedia Commons content. Any user who has 10 of their photographs recognised as Featured Pictures may write an entry on the page. Currently there are 10 such users. Their diverse backgrounds reflect Wikimedia Commons' purpose as a repository for Wikimedia projects in all languages, and the multilingual language policy - Italy, Denmark, USA, Germany, Portugal, France, Belgium, Australia.

Commons:Meet our illustrators has a similar purpose for users who create 5 Featured Pictures that are illustrations.

The self-descriptions on these pages show the diverse interests and life paths that may lead people to contribute to a Wikimedia project. One photographer comments, In my personal view, if life treats you nice, you should give something of this luck over to other people. Being a professional in Graphics and Visual EFX for over a decade, this as a chance for me to give something small back to the people through contributing some of my photographs to Wikipedia.

Links

Listings

Commons:Featured pictures/chronological - listings by month

Commons:Featured pictures - links to listings by subject

Category:Featured pictures - alphabetical

RSS feed

As desktop wallpapers

Category:Commons featured desktop backgrounds

Category:Commons featured widescreen desktop backgrounds

Picture of the Day

Commons:Picture of the day - currently all Pictures of the Day are required to be Featured Pictures (although this was not always so)

The nomination process

Commons:Featured picture candidates/Log - shows all nominations for a given month, not just successful

Commons:Featured picture candidates - view current Featured Picture candidates

Commons:Image guidelines - guidelines for evaluating Featured Picture candidates

Category:Formerly featured pictures - delisted Featured Pictures