EDT4OL/Intermediate wiki skills/Wikimedia



The Wikimedia Commons is a large image and media repository which hosts openly licensed files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation which hosts Wikipedia and a number of sister projects, for example Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikiquote.

The InstantCommons feature of the MediaWiki software
MediaWiki is the free and open source wiki software which powers both Wikipedia and WikiEducator. It has a powerful feature called the InstantCommons.

The InstantCommons enables files from the Wikimedia Commons repository to be used in any MediaWiki instance where this feature is enabled. WikiEducator has enabled the InstantCommons feature, so we can use images from the Wikimedia Commons without the need to upload the file locally. This saves time, because the image metadata and licensing information is uploaded automatically when referencing a Wikimedia Commons file.

In short, using the identical filename of the image from the Wikimedia Commons on WikiEducator will automatically insert the image on WikiEducator with all the relevant licensing information without the need to upload the image or edit the metadata.