This spring, Communication Design students in Robin Michals’ classes have worked with Richard Knipel, CUNY’s Wikimedian in Residence, to contribute photographs to Wikimedia Commons.
As an ever-growing collection of freely usable media files—images, audio, video, and more—that anyone can contribute to, Wikimedia Commons is an incredible resource of visual material. These images form the repository that Wikipedia and Wikidata draw from, but they are also used more broadly on the internet. Students had the opportunity, using an online tool that highlights which Wikidata items lack visuals, to identify needed images and then take those photographs themselves.
All student work has been collected on Wikimedia Commons using a category tag for Spring 2026 Contributions from Communication Design students, CUNY City Tech.
In City Tech Library, we’ve been working to add these images to relevant Wikipedia articles. To point towards a few examples, if you’re browsing the Wikipedia article for Long Island City, Richmond Hill, Queens, or Queens Center Mall, you might notice a photograph by a City Tech student.
Student Sami Pijuan contributed two images of P.S. 205 in Bayside, Queens, and noted, “I think it’s really cool to have something I took online and published for others to see!”
We think it’s pretty cool too.
Interested in learning about how contributing to Wikimedia Commons makes an impact? Read more on our blog! Or, explore student contributions from Fall 2025.