As of today, a search of the Wikimedia Commons for
windmill
returns 79,878 images, which is a respectable size result.
(This ignores the fact that a keyword search may in fact bring up results that are not actually of windmills - normally picking up on place names that include the
word).
However, not all the images are original to Wikimedia - a sizeable proportion have been copied there from other freely usable photo archives.
In particular, if you repeat the
search excluding Geograph
then the number drops to 66,929, so 12,949 images representing 16% of the total have simply been harvested (as the Geograph licence allows) from that other archive.
| Other Archive |
number |
percent |
notes |
| Geograph |
12949 |
16% |
UK geolocated images |
| flickr |
4881 |
6% |
photo sharing site |
| Panoramio |
2386 |
3% |
defunct geophoto site from Google |
| David Rumsey |
1848 |
2% |
maps, but also general engravings |
| DPLA |
1753 |
2% |
many digitized patents |
| Library of Congress |
975 |
1% |
|
| New York Public Library |
125 |
0.1% |
includes a collection of stereocards |
| Finnish Heritage Agency |
98 |
0.1% |
|
There are probably more external archives contributing to the Wikipedia Commons number as well.
An alternative way to determine a more accurate number of original images in the archive is to include
"own work"
in the search, which returns about 24000 images.
Many of the images in the archive get used on Wikipedia pages, but by no means all of them -
some people simply use the Commons as a way to publish their own photos with no particular use case in mind.
Since we can search via recency, we can see what has been added recently to the Commons, of which the following caught my eye:
Windmills in the Wikimedia Commons