[Wikimedia-l] Someone wants to put their promotional photo on Wikipedia. What's best practices?

[David Gerard]

I just got a phone call and followup email today asking about how to
upload a photo to be on a Wikipedia article.

This has got to be an incredibly common request. What's a standardised
way to handle it?

Here's the text I wrote back with:

===
OK - the key point with contributing a picture to Wikipedia, or rather
to Wikimedia Commons, is that you are contributing it to the world -
under a free licence.

(You can't contribute a picture "for use in Wikipedia" - Wikipedia
doesn't accept those. It needs pictures of living people to be under a
licence where literally anyone can use it.)

So, you need the person or body who owns the copyright in the picture
to contribute it under a free licence. This means you lose control
over the picture, but it does contribute it to the world. This does
not control unpleasant reuses - so be very sure you think this is a
good idea.

   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Contributing_your_own_work

This works quite well in my experience for promotional photos. It will
rapidly become *the* picture people use.

Creative Commons by-sa is a good licence, I think - anyone can use it,
but anyone can reuse it.

Once a picture is uploaded to Commons, it can be used on Wikipedia articles.
===

- But there's got to be a better text and/or page I could refer them to ...

Assume the person this is for knows very little about Wikipedia or
content freedom.


- d.