Hello, I want to start with thanking Effe iets anders, this is the most neutral email about Commons I have seen this week, and I like the fact that there is a new angle to work with.
I think Commons is both a service projects and a independent project, Commons is a free file repository and can be used in all MediaWiki site from version 1.13 or higher (source:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Instant_Commons ), so Commons is providing a service for more than 10.000 sites (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sites_using_MediaWiki). Commons is also a service project for Newspapers, magazines, other sites or things that needs images under a free license. I don't think somebody on Commons would mind if you call it a service project in this context. All Wikimedia project sites are build in MediaWiki so Commons provides them the same hosting service as the do for other MediaWiki sites, only the big difference is that the Foundation own the servers that host Commons and that the Wikimedia Foundation the only organization is that can use Commons for hosting non free images. When we look inside Wikimedia we have Wikipedia, Wikibooks,Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversety . Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons. Those nine projects all have there own scope and can work independent from the other projects, all the projects have there own community, policies, rules and content. When the Foundation will stop the could sell those projects to nine different people and all projects can keep working, the don't need a other project to keep existing. So all those project can be seen independently within the Foundation. The projects that stay over like Wikimania, Incubator or meta can be seen as projects with the soul purpose to support the nine big projects within the Foundation, Incubator can not work without other projects, Meta needs other projects to keep working also. Commons can go on with his own community, so does Wikipedia or Wikinews ect ect. So we should see Commons as a inpendend project created for giving MediaWiki sites a free file repository, but optimized for giving extra service for Wikimedia projects. Best regards, Huib * <http://www.wikipedia.org>* _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l