A few weeks ago, Wikipedia managed to amass more than three million articles; this week is Wikimedia Commons' turn to take the glory. A scan of a 1838 Danish newspaper called Kjobenhavnsposten was uploaded by user Saddhiyama to the Commons image repository, thus marking the fifth million file uploaded by a user.

Wikimedia Commons is currently the largest free media sharing website in the world, housing a wide variety of files from images, sounds, illustrations, videos and more. All of these can be reused by anyone anywhere on the web.

The public's interest has been high on this project, since only six months ago in March of 2009, Commons had reached the fourth million image mark, after previously reaching the third million mark only eight months prior to that in July 2008.

This project was put together five years ago, in September 2004, by the Wikimedia Foundation, founder of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, as a way to host the images featured on Wikipedia. The project skyrocketed when users writing their own articles on Wikipedia expressed their desire to upload their own photos.

The majority of image sources are either from user uploads or from public donations by different organizations. Here, we can mention just a few from the latest donations Wikimedia Commons got from the likes of the German Federal Archive (100,000 images) or the State and University Library in Dresden (250,000 images).

These recent donations come to complete a good year in sponsorships, after a recent grant was given by the Ford Foundation in July 2009 (worth $300,000).

Other important sources of images have been Wikimedia's photography contests that have drawn in over 10,000 files, some of them being featured in photography expositions at various museums in countries around the Globe like England and the Netherlands.

Jay Walsh, head of Communications, said that “Commons is made possible by the work of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world, in over 250 languages. Contributors upload free or public domain images, enhance and improve older scanned files, provide detailed illustrations, and increasingly upload free video and sound files. […] Congratulations to the Commoners on the Commons!”