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Commons:WMF support for Commons

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About

Over Fiscal Year 25–26, Wikimedia Commons was the focus of several Product & Technology efforts addressing infrastructure scalability, contributor workflows, event organization, multimedia performance, and tool sustainability. These initiatives fall into four broad categories:

A) Infrastructure & Platform Stability: Work such as moving Commons’ links tables to a dedicated database cluster, CDN filtering modernization, and mobile domain sunsetting improved Commons’ long-term scalability, security, and search visibility. These changes strengthen reliability for both Commons contributors and the downstream projects that rely on Commons files.

B) Contributor Experience & Community Workflows: The deployment of the CampaignEvents extension and early development of Collaborative Contributions introduced the first structured on-wiki event and contribution-tracking workflows for Commons. This supports global campaigns like Wiki Loves Earth/Monuments and improves multilingual engagement and organizer coordination.

C) Multimedia & Data Modernization: Commons regained modern visualization capabilities through Lua integration for datasets, replacing the deprecated Graph extension. Technical work also addressed tools like Video2Commons (through the Unsupported Tools Working Group), advancing upload and media-handling workflows across the platform.

D) Safety, Governance & Responsible Use of Infrastructure: Initiatives such as deploying temporary accounts on Commons strengthened privacy and platform safety, while proposed work on API user cohort validation aims to improve governance of high-cost media traffic and abuse patterns tied to Commons.

Together, these initiatives reflect a combination of foundational engineering, contributor-facing product improvements, and long-term sustainability work that reinforce Commons’ role as the movement’s central media repository.

See more

Active Projects
  • WikiLegal for Commons: A space where commons contributors can suggest topics that need input from the WMF Legal Department.
Updates

February 2025

  • Community discussions: WMF has hosted the fourth and last conversation with the Community on February 5 about impact and funding model. Also the summaries of the January and February calls were published. The purpose of these discussions is to help answer one of the key questions for the Wikimedia Foundation's 2025-2026 annual goals: "What decisions can we make with the Commons community to create a sustainable project that supports creating encyclopedic knowledge?"
  • UploadWizard Improvements: The team has deployed new changes to improve the way users can select the appropriate category. The team thinks exposing more clearly the category structure can also help users understand the difference between “depicts” and “category” fields in UploadWizard. The team also expects it would be easier for people to add the correct category, and so decrease in the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories is expected.
  • Jio set-top boxes pilot project: There is the first data coming in from our pilot project of using Wikimedia Commons images as TV screensaver on Jio set-top boxes. The engagement rose from 42 million impressions in November 2024 (98 images used) to a record 1.17 billion impressions on 6.8 million devices in January 2025 (with only 50 unique images).

Previous updates

Involved Staff
Communications
  • Please use the talk page for questions and comments!
  • We will post here the dates for the next meetings with the community. Looking forward to chatting with you.
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