User:Zro/howto/flickr

Tutorial: Flickr and Wikipedia

This tutorial in a nutshell:

When you take a photograph (or create any original work) it is automatically "copyrighted". ^[1]
To be used in Wikipedia, you must grant special and specific permissions for use of the work.
Flickr offers a simple way of releasing work under Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike licenses, both of which are compatible.

This page explains how to make your flickr photos available for Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

You can skip to the instructions section if:

You know what Wikipedia is.
You understand what "licensing your photos" means.
and know you want to contribute.

Otherwise, I encourage you to review some of the explanations below, and explore the links, if you want to know more before contributing.

Why should I do this?

It is likely that you have been directed here by a Wikipedia user who found some of your photography on Flickr. They linked you to this page because they thought that your pictures were quite good, and they wold like to include them in Wikipedia. If you are not familiar with Wikipedia and its goals, you are encouraged to read the sections that follow, but in short, some reasons to contribute are as follows:

Ensure the posterity of the subject and your work—
Improve the quality of an article concerning something you are likely interested in—
Experience the joy and fullfilment of contributing to the awesome project that is Wikipedia—

There are countless reasons to contribute and these list above are just the beginning. If you need further incentive, or desire more information on the project and licensing, continue reading. If you're already sold, skip to the instructions section

About Wikipedia

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
— Wikimedia Foundation Vision, meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vision

Wikipedia (/ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/) is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau (combination of words and their meanings) of the words wiki (a type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages. As of today, there are 6,912,606 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics).

About licenses

All of the text in Wikipedia, and most of the images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content is freely distributable and reproducible. (See the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information.)

When you license your images under a creative commons license, you are in no way giving up ownership of the images. Rather, Creative Commons licenses are the middle ground between "all rights reserved" and the "public domain". Releasing you photos under a less restrictive license allows other to use and distribute your work provided they conform to certain guidlines set forth by the license.

You can learn more about Creative Commons Licensing at the Creative Commons about page.

How to release images in Flickr under a compatible license

Creative Commons licenses offer content creators a way to grant certain permissions of use for their work.

Releasing images under a less restrictive license is easy with Flickr! As stated previously, there are a number of agreements under which you may license photos that are compatible with Wikipedia. Flickr offers two options which fall under the criteria. These options are the Creative Commons licenses.

The 2 that are compatible are:

"Attribution Creative Commons" — Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it.
1. requires that you are cited as the author of the work.
"Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons" —Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it.
1. requires that you are cited as the author of the work.
2. requires that derivative works are distributed under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

Flickr offers other options as well, but they are not compatible. The faq section at the end of this article may give more insight into this.

Releasing a single image

Sign in to flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/signin/
Go to the specific image you wish to release.
Locate the "Additional Information" section in the right sidebar.
Click "(edit)" at the end of that line.
Select either one of these options.
Click Save.

Releasing all images currently on the Flickr account

Sign in to flicker at: http://www.flickr.com/signin/
Go to http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/
Select either one of these options.
Click Save License.

Setting a default license for newly added content

Sign in to flicker at: http://www.flickr.com/signin/
Go to http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/
Select either one of these options.
Click Set Default License.

Frequently asked questions

If you have questions that you believe should be answered in this section, please ask them on the talk page.

Why is the Creative Commons Non-commercial license not acceptable?

Notes

^ this is true in all countries that have signed the Berne Convention

[1] this is true in all countries that have signed the Berne Convention

[1]