I made a Quality Image

I really hadn't expected this. I just made a simple, quick animation and thought it'd be cool already if it'd just be put online somewhere. Of course I put it online myself, but I've done that before, so I knew what to expect, what would happen. And that it should take months to see if it had any effect. But now this all happened in a week.

But what happened, you may ask. You see, I was a bit bored the other day and was looking to do something constructive on Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia). I knew a few pages on the Dutch wiki, listing pages that needed attention. Whether they needed wikification or have their external links checked or anything. So I was browsing those and came across a page asking for images. Well it was all stuff I couldn't deliver, but way at the bottom was a section for animation requests. And there was the request, posted something like two and a half years ago.

I read the article in need of the animation and agreed it needed one. The text described how the object in question functions. But that was so much text, it was very unclear. I could make up from it and other images how it works, formed an image in my mind, and went ahead to make the animation. A mere 20 frames, it took me more time finding a good GIF animator for Mac.

I uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons, so it can be used in other wiki projects too (Dutch wiki, English wiki, wikibooks, wherever they want it). And put it on both the Dutch and English page where it was needed (btw, also has a French and Finnish page, but I don't speak the languages, so I'm letting somebody else add it there).

This wasn't new to me. I've done it before with photos and an animation of a movie camera shutter and film transport. So I thought what'd happen was people would put the image on other language pages and maybe their userpages. I even found my movie camera animation on somebody's blog (of course with attribution, the Commons images are generally free to distribute or edit). But all that took a long time, so I didn't expect much happening soon.

But when I checked it later, I noticed somebody'd put it on Commons' Quality Image Candidate list. And not much later, somebody else promoted it. And just a few days later now it's on the Quality Images page (and on the French Image du jour for 26 November 2008).

So now I hope you're curious about the image. And in turn I'm curious of course about what you think of it. So opinions may be posted in the comments here.

See the image on Commons: [[Image:Lever tumbler lock animation.gif]] ;) .