Commons:Why Wikimedia Commons is useful

This is a list of ways Wikimedia Commons is or could be useful. It is incomplete and under construction.

A user thought such a list may be useful here. Potential alternative names for this list include "Potential uses of Wikimedia Commons" and "Usefulness of Wikimedia Commons".

Existing and potential uses of Wikimedia Commons include:

Serving Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects

• Finding media for illustrating a given Wikipedia article (usually by active Wikipedia editors who notice there should be some useful image, less often by active Wikimedia Commons contributors who do not edit Wikipedia on a regular basis, and least by others; this is sometimes complicated by files being scattered across many very fine-grained subcategories that bury useful images, making highest-quality or most-fitting files hard to find)
• A single place to host "free" media for use on Wikimedia projects. Otherwise, for much-used images, each sister project would need to host its own copy.
• Finding media for illustrating a given non-WP Wikimedia item (there are also Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia such as Wikidata)
• A way to find more media relevant to a given Wikipedia article – currently mainly using the Wikimedia Commons templates on Wikipedia as well as "Tools → Wikimedia Commons" or clicking on an included image, opening the WMC page for it and clicking on one of its categories (however, all of these methods are not well-known and much-used by readers). This does not only relate to existing Wikipedia articles but also potential/future ones when it comes to contributors using it this way.

As a media site in its own right

• On-site exploration & encyclopedic value: one can browse around the site and find educational/useful contents directly – some say an image is worth a thousand words and the Wikipedia approach to have lots of text with a few images is just one approach that can be complemented with other ones. For example, if there are some charts buried in some report somewhere and a diagram in some particular study that doesn't mean people find it when they search for such an image here or elsewhere. Concepts are often defined/refined/distinguished/explained as much by visual media as by explanatory text.
  • Exploring interesting files, for example using the Wikimedia Commons app (mainly via an engaging Explore page as proposed here) or by knowing about particularly interesting categories such as Category:Time-lapse videos or Category:Microscopic images by subject and/or quality-assessments-based tools like FastCCI.
  • Inspiration: Media creators such as photographers and filmmakers can browse around the site to find interesting media and techniques to create new interesting or innovative media (example, examples)
  • Helping delineate or explain concepts that require visual media to be understood or greatly benefit from such. Many subjects can't be easily explained using just text or a few images and there also are many subjects not covered on Wikipedia. One can also see where any file is used and then e.g. read the corresponding Wikipedia article where it is used or the Wikipedia article of the category that contains a given file. The Commons Main page has a few starting points for exploration, mainly the categories in the bottom right. People can also discover relevant subcategories in the sense of topics or fields for a given subject or topics in the contained media. This can inspire media or studies in similar ways to gaps-identification.
• Central repository of collaboratively organized structured media – other sites don't organize media this well using categories and collaborative work and e.g. images from reports and studies are not part of a standardized comprehensive media system and hard to find themselves and are not benefiting from the collective intelligence of Wikimedia projects (also useful for large collections that are subcategorized by subject (example)). Files are integrated into a very large advanced nuanced category system and e.g. well searchable or queryable from one interface.
  • It could be seen as a file library: e.g. illustrations, maps, or book illustrations categories and their subcategories form a true online library. Many historical or particularly relevant photos would also be part of this library (including, among others, pictures of paintings), which could be seen as an extension or complement to Wikisource. Users could use WMC to search or quickly find and access such media.
  • Finding and viewing maps: lacking a Wikimaps or Wikiatlas project, Wikimedia Commons Atlas of the World is the only proper atlas that complements Wikipedia (this atlas is probably in need of some improvements, and of better dissemination). Maps category can also be considered as an atlas in itself.

Documentary about Wikimedia Commons that includes the subject of why it is useful or people's motivations

• Enabling finding lots of or highly specific media using the elaborate category system including ways to combine categories using tools like petscan, Commons search with operators like incategory or -deepcategory, FastCCI drop down option "in this category and in…", or time/year-categories (search engines and AI tools can make use of this to find exactly what the user is looking for). One can also use it to 1) quickly find 2) relatively large numbers of 3) free-to-use files for 4) a quite specific concept.
  • For example, using APIs or readily available tools one could quickly download lots of images of People reading in art, images of fire or any particular animal, of extensively subcategorized Smiling people, Buildings in the Czech Republic, and so on. This is not as easily or not possible with topic-specific subreddits (example) or downloaders for Web image search engines. One can combine Category:Microscopic images with a category for a subject like "brain cells‎" to create (populate) a new subcategory or find items not yet contained in a category to complete it (as of 2024 this is still largely done manually, rather opaquely/individually and nonroutinely).
• Providing an outlet for media creators to publish useful/educational media (many photographers, a few illustrators (examples) and a few datagraphic-creators (example) publish content here first, often to subsequently add it to a or a few Wikipedia article/s, e.g. not limited by social media site limitations like narrow subreddit rules or opaque de/boosting algorithms).
• Entertainment/edutainment
  • generally browsing files of entertainment-type interest, see #Exploring interesting files (these can also be posted to social media which could increase awareness of WMC if a link to a page including the file was included)
  • watching films (e.g. via WikiFlix or this category) or listening to music or audiobooks (e.g. at some point via WikiVibes once issues like [1] are solved)
• Long-term structured digital preservation of humanity's media (also relates to the point about "#Making media well-maintainable")

Serving the larger open information ecology

• Making free media items available/findable in search engines like Google Images, CC-search portal and DuckDuckGo images by uploading media here, giving it descriptive findable file-titles and descriptions, and integrating it into contextualizing categories (for example sometimes images at the original source do not have such or do not describe the file well)
• Gaps identification – enabling contributors to see which media is missing in the commons so they can create/contribute these to the Commons or Wikipedia articles (however, there is no proper media request system – people would rather browse through the category of a subject and not find the media they have been looking for or thinking about which only very rarely results in such a file being uploaded or created and asking about it on social media like reddit /r/Wikipedia also doesn't seem to be effective)
• Standardization & consistency
  • Through categorization, bringing together related content from a variety of GLAMs, thereby facilitating comparison of metadata and feeding back to the GLAMs to let them know where their metadata is not mutually consistent. (example)
• Finding free media for no-/low-cost media productions, in particular informative media (for example many news articles use images from Commons and this is increasingly enabling low- to zero-cost educational videos (example?) and documentaries for TV broadcasting etc) – one could consider this to be about doing for media what Wikipedia has done for summary-style overview-type knowledge (freeing it in the sense of becoming freely accessible, openly reusable, and participative)
• Providing a way to efficiently find CCBY-compatible media – using it to find pictures for a study that is planned to be released under CCBY or for a Youtube video to be released under CCBY (example) where only free media can be used (or any other media of that type)
• Using it to find media for open source software such as FOSS mobile apps.
• Remix culture purposes or ways of use where art and educational media can be readily altered and reused (however, often art that is not very notable is deleted; this point also relates to Entertainment/Culture as well as for useful media in Wikipedia articles about subjects like music genres or media that shows how art is produced (example))
• Providing (through upload, deletion, and marking with categories such as Category:Undelete in 2025) a place to store images that cannot yet be published or republished commercially, while marking them clearly with the date when they can be.
• Finding photos of comparable structures (and of the same structure over time) when producing studies for landmark preservation.

As a platform for collaboration

• Collaborative translation: especially for explainer videos, documentaries, diagrams and infographics, including redubbing, adding subtitles, and translating subtitles. (example example tool)
• Collaborative file-improvements (example, one could also make a category or list of videos that have parts that would be useful to get converted to animated gifs or sped-up, other users doing such could also find them here without any requests or similar)
• Collaborative identification & classification (e.g. via Category:Unidentified subjects categories and identifying depicted animals or other subjects (like locations or concepts) via increasingly specific categories). This means files that were previously not useful or findable become useful through their crowd-categorization via putting them into the places of where they're useful/relevant; at some point these processes could be automated more. No other website has such a large collective intelligence user-base for media and this for example results in even quite niche subjects to have many well-organized media files.
• Making media well-maintainable (and other benefits) via all the different ways files can be modified (organized) en-masse such as via gadgets, scripts and so on such as via cat-a-lot (relates to this usecase) or via the standardized UI, technology, metadata, and so on (see also the methods in here).
• Scrutinizability – each file has a talk page and flaws, inaccuracies can be discussed there and the file can be corrected, get issues pointed out well-visibly in the file description (if not directly in the file), or get a Factual inaccuracy template (this is a major difference to other media locations such as Youtube or television where media can't be or not effectively be scrutinized; it may also allow people to replace problematic files, enable determining the best file for a subject or to gradually improve the quality of media used for a subject). There are also active discussion boards where subjects can be discussed.
• Campaigns and statistics – the platform can be used for collaborative competitions, mainly to organize, host, etc campaigns to increase the stock of free (and organized) media as is done in the Wiki Science Competitions or the Wiki Loves Earth campaigns.
• Many people can contribute to many topics – Having many volunteers contributing images, videos, or even 3D models to any topic possible, brings a big advantage for all, as some topics can be only covered by many people or few people who have media about it (e.g. of hard to get produced goods).

Future / research and development

• Uses of the category system and the structured media for media or concept classification systems such as AI systems and AI training related purposes in general – these can use the categories and their contents for grounding and then e.g. detect misclassifications in larger media sets for given subjects or then only learn higher-fidelity subjects. (this also relates to point "#Enabling finding lots of or highly specific media")
• Searching free educational media by providing very detailed natural language descriptions: an AI-assisted media search engine could be implemented, that could perform very detailed media searches (example: white cow grazing on a Swiss mountain in the canton of Fribourg with a village in the background), working in a similar way to AI image or video generators, but providing existing images, not generated ones. Categories and descriptions would provide the information for the AI search engine to work.
• Long-term unknowns – as Wikipedia gets more and more complete, the importance of WMC may increase; moreover it could become the foundation for various tools or a large more useful platform in the future, it's a long-term project and the early category structure for instance may persist for a very long time.
  • In the future all of humanity's available media could be integrated into the category structure built here, e.g. using AI media classification (note that media copyright is limited to several decades and there could also be third-party extensions using WMC that also show media of nonfree/WMC-uncompatible licenses)

General

• Greater reach or usefulness of media that is produced anyway – e.g. public broadcast media that can be freely licensed only gets a greater audience and wider dissemination if it's licensed under CCBY and uploaded to WMC (mainly if it's included in Wikipedia articles).
• Providing efficient ways to find any high-quality and/or useful-educational media for any given subject for any purpose.
• Making media freely accessible, openly reusable, and participative rather than inaccessible, propriety, costly, unreusable, disorganized, and fleeting – a general improvement of the media ecology easily available at people's, especially content creators', fingertips.
  • To have an alternative to commercial media agencies and create a polypole: Without having a free media repository, people must obey the rules of commercial photo agencies etc., that some people cannot fulfill.
• To show a different way of handling media: It has many advantages and potential to set media free (look at the extent of this archive) and does not need to be restricted for others to use. It helps the society to rethink the handling of media (and their whereabouts), illustrated by the example Wikimedia Commons.

Further information

Images and references or relevant resources per usecase, including studies, will probably be added later. User are encouraged to edit this page.

This page is not about what WMC is or which unique valuable things it offers but specific concrete ways it can or is used in the real world in practice. For many use-cases, a necessary consideration is that other sites like DuckDuckGo Images (e.g. may show images on WMC as well as nonfree ones) or YouTube (e.g. much more videos and usually also including those on WMC) would show much more media for a search – for example, the distinguishing or unique benefits of WMC need to be highlighted.

See also

• Commons:First steps#Why contribute to Wikimedia Commons?