Commons:Community portal

Welcome to the Wikimedia Commons community portal Are you new to Wikimedia Commons? Welcome! Check out what we're all about (and what we are not), or just start searching for images or other media files. You can find collections of similar files grouped by topic or by almost any other characteristic you can think of. You can even start contributing to the project in important ways, regardless of your abilities or interests, and no matter where you live or what language you speak. All information about Commons itself is available in English, and most of it is available in other languages, as well. If a page is available in multiple languages, you should be able to select your language at the top of the page.

News Twelve millionth file uploaded Wikimedia Commons now has over 12 million files as of January 13, 2012. Over two million files having been added since the 10 millionth file that was added on April 15, 2011. previous Wikimedia Commons news... Communications Help desk For questions about how to use Commons. Village pump Ask questions about features, problems you may have, or policy. Similar pages are available in several other languages. Graphic Lab A place where you can request wikigraphists to improve, clean up, or color your images. Administrators' noticeboard If you need to communicate with an administrator, for example regarding blocks and protections. IRC channels #wikimedia-commons Wikimedia Commons IRC channel #commons.wikimedia to follow the recent changes on IRC. #cvn-commons shows possible vandalism #cvn-commons-uploads shows new uploads International mailing-list commons-l (this month) Bugzilla Bugzilla: Commons (last 7 days) bug reports and feature requests Content organisation Creation and Upload Picture requests, Free media resources for uploads to the Wikimedia Commons Improvements Featured picture candidates, Valued image candidates and Quality images candidates, picture of the day and media of the day Unidentified subjects, like plants, people or animals that need to be identified. Images for cleanup, Transition to SVG of flags and graphics Categories for discussion, Uncategorized pages, Uncategorized categories, Uncategorized Media, Orphan pages, Orphan images Copyright issues Deletion requests, Candidates for speedy deletion Copyright and licensing questions Wikimedia Commons sub projects Commons:Geocoding for adding geographic location information to media, Commons:Stroke Order Project and more WikiProjects. Wikimedia Commons templates Commons:Templates

Policies and decisions Wikimedia Commons project scope The project definition and its derived detailed policy pages on licensing, allowed copyright tags and file types give you important information what we are and what not. Deletion policy The deletion policy is closely related to the Wikimedia Commons project scope. They define when and how to delete content that does not belong in Wikimedia Commons for various reasons. Multilingualism Wikimedia Commons is multilingual. Use Babel in order to find contributors who speak your language. Please add information about the languages you understand to your user page. The language policy is discussed at Commons talk:Language policy. User's Graphics abilities Categorizes users by graphic and audio knowledge, abilities or interest on Commons, in order to ease finding help in any area of media expertise. (Part of the Commons 2.0 ! project) Administrators List of administrators and votes on adminship requests. All policies and guidelines... Recommendations and howtos Help index All help, project, maintenance, discussion, policy pages and further tutorials about how to work in wikis like Wikimedia Commons are listed there. For an overview over the structure of the Wikimedia Commons project itself see Category:Commons. Software Recommended software for each media type in order to create and edit the content you want to share at Wikimedia Commons. Tools Tools for uploading and further maintenance of Wikimedia Commons as for example Commonist for uploading large numbers of images. Tool integration helps you add functionality to your Wikimedia Commons web interface. How to use Wikimedia Commons' content Overview on how to embed Wikimedia Commons content into various Wikimedia wikis and how to reuse Commons' content by third parties. See also the media help for software and hints how to watch images and films and listen to audio files provided by Wikimedia Commons. See Featured pictures, Valued images, Picture of the day and Media of the day for particularly valuable content you can reuse.