Wipipedia.org:Image use policy

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This page is in production and is not to be currently relied upon.


Summary

Be very careful when uploading copyrighted images, fully describe images' sources and copyright details on their description pages, and try to make images as useful and reusable as possible.

This page is an overview of the policies towards images — including format, content, and copyright issues — on Wipipedia. It is based on the policy formulated for Wikipedia so if you are familiar with that, this is unlikely to seem strange.

If, after reading this policy, you have specific questions, look up an active Special:Listusers/sysop sysop and leave a message on their talk page (discussion page).

For general help on using images when editing a page, see Help:Image syntax. To see what images are already loaded, see the File list. When you are happy you should be uploading an image, go to Special:Upload.

Contents

Rules of thumb

Below this brief checklist of image use rules is the detailed reasoning behind them.

  1. Always tag your image with one of the image copyright tags. When in doubt, do not upload copyrighted images.
  2. Always specify on the description page where the image came from, such as scanning a paper copy, or a URL, or a name/alias and method of contact for the photographer. For screenshots this means what the image is a screenshot of (the more detail the better). Don't put credits in images themselves.
  3. Use the image description page to describe an image and its copyright situation.
  4. Use a clear, detailed title. Note that if any image with the same title has already been uploaded, it will be replaced with your new one.
  5. Upload a high-resolution version of your image whenever possible (unless this will cause copyright issues), and use the automatic thumbnailing option of the Wipipedia image markup to scale down the image. MediaWiki accepts images up to 20 MB in size. Do not scale down the image yourself, as scaled-down images may be of limited use in the future.
  6. Crop the image to highlight the relevant subject.
  7. Use JPEG (JPG) format for photographic images, and SVG format for icons, logos, drawings, maps, flags, and such, falling back to PNG when only a raster image is available. Use GIF format for inline animations, Ogg/Theora for video. Do not use Windows BMP format images; they are uncompressed and take up too much space.
  8. Add a good alternate text for images when including them in a page. This aids people who are not displaying images, especially blind people using a voice reader.
  9. In general, there is no need to specify thumbnail size. Users can select their ideal size in preferences.
  10. Do not upload porn pictures 'just because'. Wipipedia is not shy of dealing with sexual subjects but it is an encyclopeadia, not a porn site.

Adding images

Please note: this is not the official copyright policy — it is merely a reminder with helpful tips:

Before you upload an image, make sure that either:

  • You own the rights to the image (usually meaning that you created the image yourself).
  • You can prove that the copyright holder has licensed the image under a free license.
  • You can prove that the image is in the public domain.
  • You believe, and state, a fair use rationale for the specific use of the image that you intend.

Images which are listed as for non-commerical use only and by permission are unsuitable for Wipipedia and will be deleted on sight. Such images still have restricted rights, which goes against the GFDL, under which all content on Wipipedia is licensed. Rather that trying to put up such images, try to look for an alternative which is licenced freely or in the public domain whenever possible. If no alternative can be found, it must be licensed under fair use.

This also applies for images licenced under a licence which restricts deriritives.

Always note the image's copyright status on the image description page, using one of the image copyright tags, and provide specific details about the image's origin. An image summary and image copyright tag are required for all images. The image copyright tag provides a standard template for the licensing of the image. The image summary provides necessary details to support the use of the image copyright tag. The recommended image summary contains some or all of the following:

Description: The subject of the image
Source: The copyright holder of the image or URL of the web page the image came from
Date: Date the image was created. The more exact, the better
Location: Where the image was created. The more exact the better
Author: The image creator, especially if different from the copyright holder
Permission: Who or what law or policy gives permission to post on Wipipedia with the selected image copyright tag
Other versions of this file: Directs users to derivatives of the image if they exist on Wipipedia


User-created images

Wipipedia encourages users to upload their own images, but all user-created images must be released under a free license (such as the GFDL and/or an acceptable Creative Commons license) or be released into the public domain (no license). If licensing, it is best practice to multi-license your images under both GFDL and Creative Commons.

Such images can include photographs which you yourself took (remember that rights to images generally lie with the photographer, not the subject), drawings or diagrams you yourself created, and other self-created work. However, simply re-tracing a copyrighted image or diagram does not necessarily create a new copyright — copyright is generated only by instances of "creativity", and not by the amount of labor which went into the creation of the work. Photographs of three-dimensional objects almost always generate a new copyright — photographs of two-dimensional objects (such as paintings in a museum) often do not (see the section on "public domain" below). If you have questions in respect to this, please ask them at Wipipedia_talk:Copyrights.

Images with you, friends or family prominently featured in a way that distracts from the image topic are not recommended for the main namespace (user pages are OK). These are considered self-promotion and the Wipipedia community has repeatedly reached consensus to delete such images.

Also, user-created images may not be watermarked, distorted, have any credits in the image itself or anything else that would hamper their free use, unless, of course, the image is intended to demonstrate watermarking, distortion etc. and is used in the related article. All photo credit should be in a summary on the image description page.

Free licenses

For a list of possible licenses which are considered "free enough" for Wipipedia, see Wipipedia:Image copyright tags. Licenses which restrict the use of the media to non-profit or educational purposes only (i.e. noncommercial use only), or are given permission to only appear on Wipipedia, are not free enough for Wipipedia's usages or goals and will be deleted.[1]. Sources of free images can be found at Wipipedia:Free image resources. In short, Wipipedia media (with the exception of "fair use" media — see below) should be as "free" as Wipipedia's content — both to keep Wipipedia's own legal status secure as well as to allow for as much re-use of Wipipedia content as possible.

Public domain

While there are many places to acquire public domain photos at the public domain image resources, if you strongly suspect an image is a copyright infringement (for example, no copyright status exists on its image description page and you have seen it elsewhere under a copyright notice), then you should list it for deletion (see below).

Also note that in the United States, reproductions of two-dimensional artwork which is in the public domain because of age do not generate a new copyright — for example, a straight-on photograph of the Mona Lisa would not be considered copyrighted (see Bridgeman v. Corel). Scans of images alone do not generate new copyrights — they merely inherit the copyright status of the image they are reproducing. This is not true of the copyright laws of some other countries, such as the United Kingdom.


Editing images

Use the Upload file page to replace an image with an edited version. Make sure your file has the same name as the one being replaced.

Converting an image to another file format changes the filename, hence the new image will have an entirely separate image description page.

Deleting images

  1. Contact (through their talk page) the user who uploaded the image, telling them of your concerns. You may be able to resolve the issue at this point.
  2. Remove all uses of the image from articles — make it an orphan.
  3. Add one of these notices to the image description page
    • copyright violations: add the copyright infringement notice for images from Wipipedia:Copyright problems to the image description page.
    • otherwise: add the deletion notice {{ifd}} to the image description page.
  4. List the image on one of these links:
  5. The image can then be deleted after a week in the normal way — see our deletion policy.

To actually delete an image after following the above procedure, you must be an administrator. To do so, go to the image description page and click the (del) or Delete this page links. Deleted images can now be undeleted.

Image titles and file names

Descriptive file names are also useful. A map of Africa could be called "Africa.png", but quite likely more maps of Africa will be useful in Wipipedia, so it is good to be more specific, e.g. "Africa political map.yourinitials.png", or "Africa political map with red borders.png". Check whether there are already maps of Africa in Wipipedia. Then decide whether your map should replace one (in each article that uses it) or be additional. In the first case give it exactly the same name, otherwise a suitable other name. Avoid special characters in filenames or excessively long filenames, though, as that might make it difficult for some users to download the files onto their machines. Note that names are case sensitive, "Africa.PNG" is considered different from "Africa.png". For uniformity, lower case file name extensions are recommended.

You may use the same name in the case of a different image that replaces the old one, and also if you make an improved version of the same image - perhaps a scanned image that you scanned again with a better quality scanner, or you used a better way of reducing the original in scale - then upload it with the same title as the old one. This allows people to easily compare the two images, and avoids the need to delete images or change articles. However, this is not possible if the format is changed, since then at least the extension part of the name has to be changed.

Currently there is no easy way to rename an image — they will not "Move" to new titles in the ways that articles will.

Placement

See Wipipedia:Image markup for recommendations on the best markup to use. For ideas and examples of how to place images, see Wipipedia:Picture tutorial.

Photo montages

There are four different approaches to photo montages that different Wipipedians take. Different approaches may be suitable for different subjects, or it may be possible to set a standard. The options are:

  1. Photos at bottom of article (Erotic art in Pompeii)
  2. Photos on "images of" page (e.g. sheep, images of sheep)
  3. Photos on an image description page (e.g. cattle)
  4. No photo montages allowed — only include a limited number of relevant photos accompanying article text

No decision on photo montages has been made yet. Please discuss pros and cons of each option on the talk page.

Note that it is not recommended to use animated GIFs to display multiple photos. The method is not suitable for printing and also is not user friendly (users can not save individual images and have to wait before being able to view images while other images cycle round).

Fair use images may never be included as part of a photo montage, as their status as being "fair use" depends on their proper use in the context of an article (as part of criticism or analysis). See Wipipedia:Fair use for more details.

Format

  • Drawings, icons, political maps, flags and other such images are preferably uploaded in SVG format as vector images. Images with large, simple, and continuous blocks of color which are not available as SVG should be in PNG format.
  • Drawings, icons, political maps, flags and other such images claimed as fair use should be in PNG format.
  • Photos and images with photo-like color depth should be in JPEG format.
  • Inline animations should be in animated GIF format.
  • Video should be in Ogg/Theora format.
  • Screenshots should be in PNG or JPG format, depending on the photorealism/color depth of the subject.

In general, if you have a good image that is in the wrong format, convert it to the correct format before uploading. However, if you find a map, flag, etc. in JPEG format, only convert it to PNG if this reduces the file size without causing artifacts. For further advice on converting JPEG to PNG, see Wipipedia:How to reduce colors for saving a JPEG as PNG.

Most of the maps on the CIA World Factbook website were coded as JPEG, but are now coded as GIF. To update these photos, download the GIF picture from the CIA factbook, recode it in PNG format, and upload it to Wipipedia.

Try to avoid editing JPEGs too frequently — each edit creates more loss of quality. If you can find an original of a photograph in 16-bit or 24-bit PNG or TIFF, edit that, and save as JPEG before you upload. A limited variety of edits (crops, rotation, flips) can be performed losslessly using jpegcrop (windows) or Patched jpegtran (other) try to use this where possible.

Avoid images that mix photographic and iconic content. Though CSS makes it easy to use a PNG overlay on top of a JPEG image, the Wipipedia software does not allow such a technique. Thus, both parts must be in the same file, and either the quality of one part will suffer, or the file size will be unnecessarily large.

Direct SVG support is implemented as of September 2005 (see meta:SVG image support). The SVG is dynamically rendered as a PNG at a given size when inserted into an article. If you find that a SVG image is being cropped too closely by Wikimedia's rendering software, one way around this is to draw a box around the image at the distance it should be cropped, and set the box to have no fill and no stroke color.

See also: Wipipedia:Preparing images for upload

Size

Uploaded image size

Uploaded files must be smaller than 20 megabytes (see Image:Whole world - land and oceans 12000.jpg for an image approaching that). The MediaWiki software Wipipedia uses can resize images automatically as of version 1.3, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself. Please help ensure that Wipipedia content can be reused widely—including as a source for printed media—by uploading photographic images at high resolution. Use the Wipipedia image markup to resize it.

For line art, particularly that which you've drawn yourself, it may be better to manually resize the images to the right size and use them in the article. This is because the automatic resizing function can sometimes produce images that are larger in bytes than the original and/or of worse quality than the original. This is a specific case where SVG can be useful.

In the future, Mediawiki image markup may be extended to better support "manual thumbnailing"; for now, go ahead and upload a large version of a manually-scaled image and then link to the larger version in the original's image description page.

Displayed image size

See Wipipedia:Manual of Style#Images for further guidelines.

In articles, if you wish to have a photo beside the text, you should generally use the "thumbnail" option available in the "Image markup" (this results in 180 pixels wide display in standard preferences default setting).

Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors.

Since Mediawiki dynamically scales inline images there is no need to reduce file size via scaling or quality reduction when you upload images although compression of PNGs is useful. Faster page loading can be facilitated by selecting a smaller default size in your user preferences.

Animated GIF files sometimes have problems when thumbnailed. If you find your animation corrupted or distorted when scaled down, try re-saving it with every frame the same size: A common optimization method in animated gif crunchers is to write variable-sized frames, sometimes labeled as: "Save only the portions of frames that have changed". Wipipedia's current version of ImageMagick does not seem to support this.

Inline animations should be used sparingly; a static image with a link to the animation is preferred unless the animation has a very small file size. Keep in mind the problems with print compatibility mentioned above.


Content

Please discuss the contents of images used on Wipipedia on the talk page.

Images should depict their content well (the object of the image should be clear and central).

Image queuing

Articles may get ugly and difficult to read if there are too many images crammed onto a page with relatively little text. They may even overlap.

For this reason, it is often a good idea to temporarily remove the least-important image from an article and queue it up on the article's talk page. Once there is enough text to support the image, any contributor is free to shift the image back into the article.

If a contributor believes such a queued image to be essential to the article, despite the lack of text, he or she may decide to put it back in. However, he or she should not simply revert the article to its previous state, but make an attempt to re-size the images or create some sort of gallery section in order to deal with the original problem.

It is a good idea to use the <gallery> tag for queued images.

It is important that queued images not be lost when archiving of talk pages takes place.

Note: Unfree images (used under the fair use doctrine) should not be moved to talk pages in this fashion. Unfree images are only allowed as long as they are in actual use in an article for encyclopedic purposes. See Wipipedia:Fair use#Policy and Wipipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion#Images/Media for details.

Revision history of articles containing images

Old versions of articles do not show corresponding old versions of images, but the latest ones, unless the file names of the images have changed.

Free and open-source software

These free and open source software packages have been recommended by Wikipedians for use in image and media manipulation:

Browse Wikipedia images in the Google cache

(warning: Many of these images are subject to copyright. Check their copyright status and seek permission if necessary before republishing.)

Related topics

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