User:Donald Trung/Why Wikimedia Commons isn't twice the size of the English Wikipedia (as of 2018)
Wikimedia Commons is a huge project, in fact it's technically “the biggest Wikimedia project” standing as of writing ✍🏻 this at “Content pages: 47,189,991; Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.): 64,150,857; Uploaded files: 47,354,331”. Meanwhile the English Wikipedia as of writing ✍🏻 this has “Content pages: 5,665,455; Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.): 45,157,149; Uploaded files: 869,670” now sure there are single users here on Wikimedia Commons that have uploaded more files 📁 than are hosted in the entirety of the English Wikipedia. Of course if one solely looks at content pages Wikimedia Commons is the clear winner 🥇 by a long shot, however a multitude of factors play into this, I often call Wikimedia Commons “a deletionist’s paradise” because no other Wiki (even non-Wikimedia Wiki's included) seems to have a community so happy to delete other's work, however even with such a huge amount of deletion-fetishists the titanic amount of content being created on a daily basis contributes to an enormous growth, however the the total number of pages on Wikimedia Commons is currently (as of writing ✍🏻 this) at “64,150,857” compared to the English Wikipedia’s “45,157,149”, this is a difference of less than twenty million, so what causes this? One would expect a Wikimedia project where the most common form of edit is a simple page creation be a lot bigger than one with lots of revisions to most of its articles, however the reality of how both Wikipedia works and how Wikimedia Commons works shows why this difference isn't so big, first of all redirects are a very popular thing on the English Wikipedia, almost every possible spelling, popular and unpopular term/name, (common) spelling errors, capitalisation, and sometimes just random (former) redlinks turn into redirects, even names in other languages and if someone deems a redirect unlikely they simply nominate it for deletion causing another page to be created, meanwhile redirects on Wikimedia Commons are a different beast altogether, for most files 📁 that get renamed a redirect might be kept... Or it might not. Another thing to look at are mass content-creators, while here we have mass uploaders like Fæ and basically anyone with access to Flickr2Commons, people tend to forget that the English Wikipedia has an Army of bots that create micro-stubs for random human settlements, species of moths, species of plants, Etc. These micro-stubs all get talk pages (something which rarely happens on Wikimedia Commons), redirects, templates, Etc. With only a difference of about 19.000.000 pages one would wonder why Wikimedia Commons isn't twice as big as the English Wikipedia in size, well a number of volunteers is another thing, the English Wikipedia simply has a lot more volunteers, the fact that Wikimedia Commons today is so big is mostly due to a few systems set in place, mass-uploads from Flickr, the now-defunct Panoramio, and similar websites help fuel Wikimedia Commons’ growth, and although every other Wikimedia project is dependent on Wikimedia Commons for its media, most users come here from those other communities, upload only a handful of images “they need” and then return to those communities.
Comparatively creating a page on Wikipedia is a lot easier too, if you want to make a redirect for “Yongzhou District” just write down “Yongzhou district” as a valid alternative, if you wish to upload your own work 🏢 to Wikimedia Commons you would actually have to create intellectual property of educational value (like a picture 📷) and then appropriately name and categorise it all while it can’t be an inferior version of an existing file 📁. For this reason the process of page creation on Wikimedia Commons is actually a lot less easy than on the English Wikipedia despite this project being more content-focused with more tools for mass-imports. Of course this gap could (and will) probably grow more in favour of Wikimedia Commons over the years, but it’s simply a curiosity as to why the English Wikipedia has so many pages even compared next to Wikimedia Commons being only “almost narrowly” beaten by Wikimedia Commons.
Original publication 📤[edit]
Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 22:36, 11 June 2018 (UTC)