Overview [ edit ]

Press conference - Bundesarchiv and Wikimedia Germany

Starting on Thursday December 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new images. Wikimedia Commons received more than 80,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archives. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives.

These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archives owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.

The images are 800 pixels in size on the longer side.

The other part of the cooperation is a tool for linking people from a list compiled by the Federal Archives to the German Wikipedia Persondata and to the person authority file of the German National Library (something German Wikipedia has already been doing since 2005).

To our knowledge the donation of 80,000 images is the single largest one to Wikimedia Commons so far and we are very hopeful that this is only the start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other archives and image databases.

Reporting errors [ edit ]

See Error reports

Technical [ edit ]

Uploads are done using User:BArchBot. It's not a real bot but an import using a server side maintenance script.

All uploads go into Category:Images from the German Federal Archive or into at least one subcategory.

Technical problems resulting from the way we receive the metadata about images are collected at Commons:Bundesarchiv/problems

Statistics [ edit ]

Unclear license status [ edit ]

See Questionable licensing

To do [ edit ]

There are a lot of things to do besides uploading the pictures. Commons:Bundesarchiv/Todo has a loose collection. If you can think of more, feel free to add to it. Please report errors (e.g. descriptions or corrupt files) by the Bundesarchiv on Commons:Bundesarchiv/Error reports.

See Commons:Bundesarchiv/Error reports/Corrections on Commons for what's still left to do here on Commons.