In the past week I have been quietly running an experiment by having a small program 'mirror' the lovely LACMA collection and a collection of British cartoons (Library of Congress) from Wikimedia Commons to Flickr.[1] So far I have uploaded 10,000 images on to my Flickrstream.[2]
Here's the weird part, I am getting very large numbers of views on Flickr. This could be the "newness" of the images, however the numbers have surprised me. For example since uploading an 18th C. engraving of "The harlots nurse" to Flickr 3 days ago, the picture has already had 500 views by the public. In comparison, when I uploaded the image to Commons, it had 10 views in the first 30 days and it has had 1 view in the last month.[3] If the level of public impact can be a magnitude higher by releasing on Flickr, this seems a worthwhile and relatively easy thing to consider including in the plan for any batch upload to Commons and in the long term it may encourage Flickr image reusers to visit Commons as their source due to our clear public domain licencing. As my Flickr images use the identical text to their Commons partners, and give handy links back to Commons, this approach seems a win-win, especially considering how we have developed user friendly tools to mirror collections in the opposite direction. Does anyone have reports that compare the impact of having the same collection on Flickr and Commons? Links: 1. Collections on Commons uploaded to Flickr: - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:British_Cartoon_Prints_Collection - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_LACMA_uploaded_by_F%C3%A6 2. Group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wikimedia-commons/ 3. "The harlots nurse": - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_harlots_nurse,_or_modern_procuress_LCCN2002719530.jpg - https://www.flickr.com/photos/50398299@N08/16204060587/ - http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/latest30/File:The_harlots_nurse,_or_modern_procuress_LCCN2002719530.jpg Fae -- [email protected] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ GLAM mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
