FAIR:Image use policy

Rules of thumb

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

  1. Keep copyrights in mind when uploading images.
  2. Always provide a detailed source for where the image came from, either a URL if it is from the web, or a name (or alias) and method of contact(i.e. Talk page, email, etc.) for the photographer.
  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, and use the automatic thumbnailing option of the Wikipedia image markup to scale down the image. MediaWiki accepts photos up to 2 MB in size. Do not scale down the image yourself, as scaled-down images may be of limited use in the future. Preferably use thumbnails less than 35 kilobytes in size (70 kB at most).
  6. Edit the images to show just the relevant subject.
  7. If you create an image that contains text, please upload also a version without any text. It will help Wikipedias in other languages use them (translate them).
  8. Don't put photo credits in articles or on the images themselves; put them on the description page.
  9. Use JPEG format for photographic images, and PNG format for icons, logos, drawings, maps, flags, and such. Use GIF format for animations. Do not use Windows BMP format images; they are uncompressed and take up too much space.
  10. Add a good alternative text for images.
  11. Think carefully if offensive pictures are really necessary. Consider providing a link to the picture, and a warning of the picture's contents, rather than place it directly in the article. If you have concerns regarding the appropriateness of an image, discuss it on the relevant article talk page.

Copyright (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 image; that it is in the public domain; or that the copyright holder has agreed to license it under the GNU Free Documentation License. Always note the image's copyright status on the image description page. If you created the image, for example, write image created by John Doe on Jan 1st, 2000 (replacing John Doe with your name, and Jan 1st, 2000 with the image creation date). Don't just write image created by me.

Under United States copyright law, all images published before January 1, 1923 in the United States are now in the public domain, but this does not apply to images that were created prior to 1923 and published in 1923 or later. The year 1923 has special significance and this date will not roll forward before 2019. Because FAIRwiki pages, including non-English language pages, are currently hosted on a server in the United States, this law is particularly significant here.

See also:

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. Drop a line to the person 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 a reason for deletion to the image description page

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 cannot be undeleted. Therefore they are gone permanently unless someone happened to keep a backup.

Image titles

Descriptive titles are also useful. A map of Africa could be called "Africa.png", but quite likely more maps of Africa will be useful, so it is good to be more specific, e.g. "Africa political map.yourinitials.png". Check whether there are already maps of Africa in Wikipedia. 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. Every skin except Nostalgia has either a “move” tab, or a “Move” or “Move this page” hyperlink. Clicking on one of these links will take you to a Move page, which doesn’t work. When you try to rename the image file, all you get is the following error message - “Error: could not submit form”. Therefore, the correct method to rename an image is to upload the image again, with the correct file name, and leave a request for speedy deletion on the first (incorrect file name) image. One template you might use for that is {{deletebecause|your reason here}}. Before you place the speedy deletion notice, make sure that all the articles that linked to the old image now link to the new image. A list of articles linking to an image is found at the end of the image's page.

Placement

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

Photo montages

There are four different approaches to photo montages that different wikipedians 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
  2. Photos on "images of" page ,
  3. Photos on an image description page
  4. No photo montages allowed - only include a limited number of relevant photos

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)

Format

  • Drawings, icons, political maps, flags and other such images (basically those with large, simple, and continuous blocks of color) should be in PNG format.
  • Photos and photo-like maps should be in JPEG format.
  • Animations should be in animated GIF format.

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 Wikipedia: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 wikipedia.

Try to avoid cropping or otherwise 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.

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 Wikipedia 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.

See also: Wikipedia:How to keep image file sizes as small as possible

Size

Uploaded image size

Uploaded files must be smaller than 2 megabytes. The MediaWiki software Wikipedia uses can resize images automatically as of version 1.3, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself. Please help Wikipedia content be reused widely—including as a source for printed media—by uploading photographic images at high resolution. Use the Wikipedia 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.

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

In articles, if you wish to have a photo beside the text, you should generally use the "thumbnail" option available in the "Image markup", or approximately 200-250 pixels of width if you're doing it manually. Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors.

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.

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.

Recommended software

These software packages have been recommended by wikipedians for use in image manipulation:

  • The GIMP [1] (free, Open source - for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
  • ImageMagick [2] (free, Open source - for Linux, Windows, Mac OS 9 or X, and others)
  • PMView [3] (Commercial software - for Windows, OS/2)
  • GraphicConverter [4] (Shareware - for Mac OS 8, 9 or X)
  • IrfanView [5] (Freeware - for Windows) A multi-featured freeware tool, supports many image formats
  • XNView [6] A multi-featured freeware tool, supports many image formats
  • Adobe Photoshop [7] A very popular photo and image manipulation program.
  • Ulead PhotoImpact [8] A photo and image editor
  • Adobe Illustrator [9] A very popular imaging program, used especially for creating vector-based graphics.
  • Macromedia Fireworks [10] Primarily used for processing static and animated web graphics. Contains only basic image manipulation tools.
  • Paint.NET [11] (Freeware - for Windows) Freeware image editing software based on the .NET platform. Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers.
  • Corel Paint Shop Pro [12] A powerful, far less expensive alternative to Adobe Photoshop - for Windows

Related topics

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