AntWeb is a database maintained by the California Academy of Sciences. It aims to draw up an inventory of all existing species of ants.

History

Originally, AntWeb content was published under the Creative Commons license Attribution – Non commercial – Share-Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA). This license is not free, and not compatible with Wikimedia Commons.

In October 2009, AntWeb decided to switch to the free license Creative Commons Attribution – Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA), and to upload their files on Commons themselves.

With input from the Commons community, the upload process was worked out smoothly. In the end, 31,905 were uploaded between October 17 and 23 2009.

Protagonists

• User:File Upload Bot (AntWeb), the upload bot ;
• User:Davethau, software engineer at AntWeb and bot operator ;
• User:Waldir.

Images

• Category:Images from AntWeb

Related discussions

• Commons:Village pump/Archive/2009Oct#AntWeb batch uploading
• Commons:Batch uploading/AntWeb images
• Commons:Bots/Requests/File Upload Bot (AntWeb)

Impact

• AntWeb goes CC-BY-SA, guest post by Waldir Pimenta on Brianna Laugher's blog
• AntWeb donates images to Commons at the Wikipedia Signpost
• (French) Grâce à AntWeb, les fourmis partent à la conquête de Wikipédia ! at S.I.Lex
• (French) La libération du savoir est un travail de fourmis at Framablog
• Open Access News roundup by Peter Suber
• AntWeb, Fedora Project, Wikitravel → CC BY-SA 3.0 at the Creative Commons blog
• Usage of the images in various Wikipedias