User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/Image uploads for dummies

So you were intending to upload an image to Wikipedia, but you found the instructions confusing, or can't figure out what to do about the licensing and copyright, or you got warnings on your user talk page that you were doing something wrong or the images were tagged for deletion? Here I'll try to explain briefly what you need to keep in mind about images.

Pay attention to copyright

In many places on the Internet, people just use other people's images on their blogs, websites or discussion forums without caring much about copyright. Wikipedia is different. We want to be scrupulously clean about these things. When you upload images, please always be careful and absolutely honest about where they come from, who made them and who owns them.

Please keep in mind that the large majority of images you see online on other websites are not free, and there is no way we can use them. Just because somebody put an image up somewhere on a website where it's freely accessible for all to see does not mean it is automatically free for you to take it and publish it elsewhere. It's still copyrighted.

Don't give in to the temptation of trying to sneak in images you just took from somewhere and upload them here, thinking that it's for the good of Wikipedia because you'll be improving our articles with them. If the image isn't truly free, we really don't want it. No matter how fine an image it is. We really, really mean that.

Use the image description page

When you upload an image, you will see a field labelled "File description / summary" in the upload form. Below it, there is a dropdown box labelled "licensing". After you click upload, you will find everything you entered in these fields as part of a wiki page, displayed underneath your image. You can still change its contents by clicking the "edit" button at the top of the screen, like on any other wiki page. (Don't try to change it by going through the Special:Upload form again – that way, you will only be uploading a new version of your file needlessly, but whatever you enter in the form the second time will only be stored as an edit summary and won't be added to the page.)

This page is very important, and you must use it, to give a description of your image and of its source and copyright status. The information you give must be sufficient for other editors to verify where it comes from, who made it and whether its licensing status is okay. You will find more hints about what to include in the sections below.

For some parts of the description page, there are ready-made templates ("tags") that you can use, especially for the copyright licensing declarations. You can recognize them in the wiki text by their double curly brackets ({{ … }}). There is a list of such tags at Wikipedia:Copyright tags. In most cases, the "licensing" dropdown box will produce such a tag for you. If you have trouble finding one that fits your case, just write everything you have to say about the image in the summary field in your own words; somebody can then help with translating that into the correct tag.

If you don't include enough information in the description page, or if the information you enter is false, your image will probably get deleted quite soon.

Types of copyright status

Wikipedia makes a basic, important distinction between "free images" and "non-free images".

A free image is one that is legally okay for anybody (not just us on Wikipedia) to use and re-use, for any purpose (including, for example, commercial use). Everything else is non-free. Since Wikipedia is a free content project, it is very important that images should be free too. Non-free images can be used only as an exception, under special conditions (described below).

In order for an image to be "free", it is not enough that its author has just published it on some website where people can freely access and see it. It only becomes free if the author has given an explicit declaration to that effect, called a free license. Typically we use named standard licenses for that purpose, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license ("cc-by-sa") or the GNU Free Documentation License ("GFDL"). If you upload an image you made yourself, you must give such a licensing statement. If you upload an image from somebody else, you must prove the copyright owner has done so.

A special kind of free images that don't need a license are so-called public domain images. These are images that don't belong to anybody at all. This is typically the case for very old images, such as old paintings or very old photographs, and for a few other special cases too.

For non-free images, the legal principle that we invoke to justify them is called fair use. Fair use is a concept in US law and it means that the image is copyrighted but we are nevertheless justified in using it for certain special purposes. This is typically the case when we need to analyse a copyrighted work itself, for instance in articles about modern works of art, movies, famous photographs and so on. However, since these are "non-free" works, it is our policy to be very careful about such cases and use them only where it's absolutely necessary; in doing so we restrict ourselves even more than the law itself would. The rules about this are set out at Wikipedia:Non-free content.

If you have a free image, please consider that your image might be even more useful if you upload it not here on the English Wikipedia, but on our sister wiki, the "Wikimedia Commons" (http://commons.wikimedia.org). Any image uploaded there can automatically be used on all Wikipedias in all languages, whereas if you upload it locally on the English Wikipedia wiki, it can be used only here. If you have a registered account on the English Wikipedia, it will automatically be valid on Commons too (same username and password), so it's just a click away and uploading there will be no more work than doing it here. On the other hand, Commons does not accept non-free/fair-use images, so if you want to upload those, you are stuck with doing it here.

Types of images

Here's a list of frequent situations. These sections will help you decide whether you can or cannot upload an image, and what you should put in the description page in each case.

Free images

Self-made images

You made an image yourself (for instance, you took a photograph or drew a diagram) and you want to use it on Wikipedia? That's great, and we really appreciate your work. Just keep in mind that by "self-made" we really mean "entirely self-made". If you took an image from somewhere else and modified it, for instance by cropping it, photoshopping it, redrawing/copying it, or extracting it from a video, TV programme or computer programme (a screenshot), it doesn't actually count as your "own work". In copyright law, such a thing is called a "derived work", and there's still the copyright of the original work on it. So, in all these cases, please read on in the sections below.

Your image "summary" should contain: a description of what the image is / what it shows; a brief description of how you made it (i.e. where and when you took a photograph, or how you created a diagram); and a free license statement. The recommended license is the "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike" license ("cc-by-sa"), which is the same license we also use for our text contributions every time we write something on Wikipedia. The tag for it looks like this: {{cc-by-sa}}.

Images given to you by somebody else

This is a very frequent situation: let's say you are writing an article about a person, perhaps somebody you know, and that person has personally given you one of their photographs so you can put it in the article. Or, you find a beautiful photograph on the web, you write an e-mail to the author asking if you can use it, and they are kind enough to agree.

That's great, and we really appreciate that person's generous offer and also your effort in contacting them and getting their permission. Unfortunately, there's a bit of paperwork to do now, because you need to document what happened. Remember, a "free image" is one that's okay for anybody to use, for any purpose, not just for us. So, if that person told you: "yes, go ahead, you can use this image on Wikipedia", that's unfortunately not enough. We must make sure they actually meant: "yes, you can use it on Wikipedia and then everybody else can also use it elsewhere". In other words, we again need an explicit licensing statement. Something like: "Yes, I am licensing this image of mine for free use under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license."

Your image summary should contain: an acknowledgment who is the original author / copyright owner of the image, the precise terms of the license chosen by the owner, and a description of how you acquired it from them.

And now comes the tricky thing: somebody might ask you for proof. If this happens, don't panick, although in some cases it may mean you have to go to the trouble of re-contacting the author and asking for confirmation. Ask the author to write an e-mail with the above licensing statement to our copyright register at "permissions-en (at) wikimedia.org". Or, if they already gave you their permission in an e-mail, forward that mail to the same address above. Or, if the author has already published their image on their own website, ask them to add a licensing statement to the website.

Please do not try to shortcut this process by simply omitting to mention the original source and instead claiming you are the author yourself. I know it's tempting, but please keep in mind, we really don't want cheating. And in many cases, if you falsely claim you are the author, people will easily figure out that the claim is implausible for some reason or other, and you will get into trouble with unnecessary suspicions of copyright violation. Better state the full facts up front from the start.

Freely licensed images on the web

Remember, most images out there on the web are not free in our sense, even if they are freely accessible and freely downloadable somewhere. But there are some websites where authors actually do publish their images under free licenses like ours. Famous examples are "Flickr" and "Panoramio". But watch out: not every image on these sites is free! On Flickr, if you see or , it's okay. If you see or , that's not okay, because it contains a restriction ("noncommercial use only" and "no derivative works", respectively).

If a website only has a standard "copyright" (©, "all rights reserved") line at the bottom, you know it's not okay. Even if it has no copyright statement at all, it's probably not okay, because images are copyrighted by default, even without such a mark. Of course you can still contact the author and ask for permission. In that case, the rules in the section above apply.

If you are uploading an image from a website with a free license, your summary should acknowledge the original author and contain the precise license you found in the source, and a link to where you found it. Please don't just link to the image file directly (http://example.com/.../image.jpg), but to the html webpage that contains the image (http://example.com/.../webpage.html), so other users can see the image in its context and can verify the licensing statement. Sometimes you will need two separate links to the image and to the site's licensing policy, if they are not on the same page.

Public domain images

There are different reasons why an image may be in the public domain (i.e. not subject to any copyright whatsoever). These may include:

• images that are very old and whose copyright term has expired (rule of thumb: published before 1923, but see below for more details)
• images of certain types of official items such as flags and official state symbols, which are typically not considered copyrighted (but this differs between different countries of origin)
• images created by the US federal government and federal agencies, which by law cannot claim copyright on their works (note that this only applies to federal agencies and a few others, not to all US public bodies, nor to all governments)
• images that are too simple to count as a creative work, including symbols that consist entirely of simple geometric shapes, or logos that consist purely of a word or a few letters.

Unfortunately, the precise rules of what falls under each of these headings can be pretty complex. In the case of expiration of copyright due to age, you may have to consider a whole bunch of factors, such as: date of creation, date of first publication, country of first publication, date of author's death, formal context of publication. A good summary of it is here: Cornell copyright page

Yes, I know, it's a headache. And unfortunately, if you want to upload an image under a "public domain" claim, it's your responsibility to figure out what rules apply. In your image summary, you should always first say where exactly you got the image from (the direct source), and then state why you think it is in the public domain (e.g. which of the rules in the table on the Cornell page above applies). You must also add all the information necessary to verify this is the case (e.g. date of creation, date and place of first publication, etc.), to the extent this is possible.

Non-free images

Remember, a "non-free image" is any image that does not fall in any of the above categories. And using a non-free image is, in principle, only allowed as a matter of exception on Wikipedia (even though in practice it is done very often). This is a bit of a contentious and hotly debated topic on Wikipedia. We have made it a policy that we must follow some self-imposed restrictions in using such items. There is an official statement to that effect by the Wikimedia Foundation (the body that runs Wikipedia), which you can find here: foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy. Our internal policies are at Wikipedia:Non-free content, and the core parts of the rules are at Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria (short WP:NFCC).

Because non-free content is such a tricky thing, there is also more paperwork: your description page needs to contain an explicit justification of what you need the image for, and an explanation of why you believe it meets the rules of NFCC. This is called a "non-free use rationale" or "fair use rationale" (see Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline).

Editors on Wikipedia keep debating about just how narrowly these rules should be handled, and there are often heated discussions about whether a certain image is admissible. So, if you find your image challenged or proposed for deletion, don't be too upset. If in doubt, you may want to ask for advice at Wikipedia:Media copyright questions or Wikipedia:Non-free content review.

The following list is not a set of official rules, but just a collection of observations and advice from an editor who has a lot of experience with handling non-free image issues and with what kinds of cases are typically considered okay or not okay.

Works that are the object of an article

This is in some sense the "classic" case of fair use: you are writing an article about a famous painting by a modern artist (say, Guernica), or about an historic photograph that is so famous that it needs an article all by itself (say, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima). You can't reasonably write about this work without showing the reader what it looks like. So your fair use rationale can be very simple: after stating what the image is, who made it and where you got it from, you just state: "this image is the object of discussion and analysis in its own dedicated article, Guernica (painting)." This will typically be okay.

Works that are the object of discussion in another article

A similar situation may obtain if you need to discuss a work within the context of some other article. For instance, in the article about an artist (Picasso), we will want to show some examples of his work, because otherwise we couldn't analyse his style, his influence, etc. An image is particularly easy to justify if you can show that there is substantial, specific, analytic discussion of it, for instance if there is a whole section dedicated to this particular work.

Things may get a bit more difficult if you need to justify how many images you are using. The NFCC rules say our use of non-free images must be minimal. So you can't just add a big gallery of dozens of pictures of the same artist. If you find you need to use more than one or two, you should individually explain why: what is each of them meant to show, what analytical issues in the article are being illustrated by each, why the one image helps to understand something that couldn't be understood by seeing the others that are already there, and so on.

Screenshots and other excerpts of larger works

This is a situation that often comes up in articles about popular culture topics: articles about movies, TV programmes, video games, comics, music videos and the like.

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