Wikipedia:GLAM/Natural History Museum and Science Museum/releasing content

Guide to releasing content for galleries, archives and museums for use on Wikimedia projects

Wikimedia Projects

Wikimedia, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, is dedicated to providing educational material that may be freely reproduced. Every article, picture, sound, or video you find on Wikimedia's sites may be reused for any purpose. Wikipedia contributors generally agree to release their work under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, meaning that they attach the following conditions to reusing their work: attribution (in the form of a link to their user page), and any derivative works are released under the same license.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. Wikimedia Commons uses the same wiki-technology as Wikipedia and everyone can edit it. Unlike media files uploaded to other projects, files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons can be embedded on pages of all Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia.

What is a Creative Commons license

Creative Commons licences are a set of copyright-licenses created by Creative Commons (CC) (a non-profit organization) which allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. The licenses make it easier for you to share your knowledge and creativity with the world.

Compatible Creative Commons Licenses

Wikimedia Commons supports Attribution, ShareAlike and zero licenses, the most popular of which is the ShareAlike (sometimes shortened to CC-BY-SA) which allows people to:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work
• to make commercial use of the work

A full description of the Attribution-ShareAlike license is available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Why release images under an open license?

• Uploading your images to Commons connects them with other information giving them context and extra information including translations of that information into other languages.
• It's interesting to share your knowledge with other people, it's an opportunity to be part of educating people all over the world.
• A much wider audience for the images, there are over 280 different language Wikipedias and the images can be used on all of them, you can even track where they're being used.
• Allowing people to share, use, combine and even build upon works can have unusual outcomes. A British museum found in 2013 that their £5,000 Van Dyk copy was an original worth around £1,000,000.

Case Studies

US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Starting in July 2011, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) undertook a major contribution of tens of thousands of files to Commons. NARA is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents, which comprise the National Archives.

what they did

Smithsonian Institution Archives

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) is the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, a group of museum and research centres "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge".

what they did

How to release images under an open license

Add a Creative Commons Logo to your website

A helpful tool with logos and to generate the html to add to your website is available here

Upload your images to Flickr under an open license

Flickr is a very widely used image site

• It's possible to set image licenses when uploading images as documented here.
• It's possible to change the licenses of images once they've been uploaded as documented here.

Contact a Wikimedia volunteer to port the images over to Wikimedia Commons or use a tool like Flickr2Commons to do it yourself

Doing this also gives another audience to the work, giving it an even wider reach.

Upload the images directly to Wikimedia Commons

1. Go to commons.wikimedia.org and click create an account
2. Go to Upload page (under participate on the right hand side of the screen)
3. Select the files which you'd like to upload
4. Set appropriate file names describing the images and add a description and a category
5. Click on the agreement to release your images

If you would like to know more or are looking for help or support contact your local Wikimedia Chapter through meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters