Wikimedia Commons for UKOER resources

Wikimedia commons shares many millions of freely available, freely licensed raw media assets. Wikimedia is a sister project of Wikipedia, and like Wikipedia uses the Media Wiki software.

Formats and standards
Formats used in Commons have to be truly free, i.e. free of licensing and patent restrictions in all territories around the world. This prevents the use of some common formats, especially for video.


 * Still images and animations: SVG, PNG, JPEG, XCF, GIF (including animated), TIFF.
 * Sound: Ogg Vorbis, WAV, FLAC (in a .ogg container rather than a .flac container)
 * Moving images: WebM, OGG Theora (Help on converting)
 * Documents: PDF, DjVu

As of September 2013, the maximum file size for all kinds of uploads is 100 MB, though there are ways to upload files of almost any size. (more details)

API
Comprehensive RESTful API, an implementation of the Mediawiki API, exposing data in a wide variety of formats including XML, JSON and PHP.

Feeds
RSS and/or Atom feeds available for specific categories, for specific users, for recent changes across the site, for Media of the Day, for Picture of the Day, or for Featured Pictures.

Other metadata
There is a rich tagging system for identifying a wide range of IP statuses. Ticketing system for recording licence holder's permission by email if the uploader is not the licence holder.

EXIF metadata from images is also extracted and displayed.

Aggregation and grouping
Commons uses MediaWiki's built-in category system. The category system can be used to generate feeds.

Content export & embedding
Each file has a "Use this file" link which generates embed code. Commons also allows transclusion of its files in other sites so long as the license is respected.

MediaWiki wikis on other servers can be set up so that Commons files can be included by just by including the name of the file in square brackets.

Usage stats for resources
Files pages on Commons display any Wikimedia projects where the file is used (e.g. English Wikipedia, Polish Wikibooks, French Wikiversity...). Page view stats for individual Wikipedia articles can be accessed from each article's Talk page. The GLAMorous tool shows overview statistics for all the files in a given category: how many there are, where in Wikimedia they have been used, and what proportion are used in Wikimedia pages. See the reports for images shared by State Library of Queensland or the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Use by OER Projects
MIT OCW video lectures uploaded