Yes, that’s right. Three hundred and fifty million words. And it appears that number only scratches the surface.
What does this number of words represent? Its based upon the old saying - “a picture is worth a thousand words”. So let’s divide by one thousand, that leaves us with three hundred and fifty thousand pictures.
That’s how many images were recently donated to WikiMedia Commons from the Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Fotothek. Its incredible. I’ve been sifting through them and have found some real gems, like these:
Yes, we copied those images and are hosting them on our servers. How can we do such a thing? Because the images are kindly licensed under a Creative Commons license. That means that the images we copied and edited from them are also licensed as such - its a “share and share alike” license.
I was amazed with Wikipedia for the first few years, then I got a little disgruntled by the bureaucracy of it. Now I’m again feeling very impressed.
