Event:Commons community discussion - 5 February 2025 16:00 UTC

In the coming months, the Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting a series of community conversations with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year.

The topic for the February 2025 discussion will be impact and funding model.

One vision of Wikimedia Commons is for it to be primarily a repository of images for use on Wikipedias. In this world, the Wikimedia Foundation might focus on building components in Wikipedia that bring images into articles and Commons, maybe assisted by machine learning tools for editors.

Another vision for Wikimedia Commons is one in which the project is an offering in its own right, and users share, discover, and utilize media content for its own independent value. In this world, investments would be needed to make it easier to search and discover media on the Commons website itself, including through: structured data on images, machine assisted tagging, more storage capacity and scale, investing in APIs that reusers would want, and workflows for educators to discover visual materials for their class.

Each of these directions would likely involve bringing in new volunteers and partners aligned with that focus. A different revenue model would also need to be explored to support substantial new development work. We would not invest in both, but only in one of them. Does it make sense to invest in bringing content from Commons into Wikipedia or focus on developing Commons into an offering in its own right?

Link to the call: TBA