KCpedia:Image use policy

From KCpedia

This page is a brief overview of the policies towards images — including format, content, and copyright issues — on KCpedia. To upload files go directly to Special:Upload.

Contents 1 Rules of thumb 2 Adding images 2.1 User-created images 2.2 Public domain 2.3 Fair use considerations 3 Editing images 4 Deleting images 5 Image titles and file names 6 Placement 7 Format 8 Size 8.1 Uploaded image size 8.2 Displayed image size 9 Image queuing 10 Revision history of articles containing images 11 Recommended software

Rules of thumb

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

1. Always specify on the description page where the image came from, such as a URL, or a name/alias and method of contact for the photographer. Don't put credits in images themselves.
2. 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.
3. Upload a high-resolution version of your image whenever possible and use the automatic thumbnailing option to scale down the image. MediaWiki accepts images up to 7 MB in size. Do not scale down the image yourself, as scaled-down images may be of limited use in the future.
4. Crop the image to highlight the relevant subject.
5. Use JPEG 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. Fair use icons, logos, drawings, maps, flags, and such should be uploaded in PNG format instead of SVG. 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.
6. Add good alternative text for images.

Adding images

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.

User-created images

Wikipedia 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 often do not (see the section on "public domain" below).

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.

Public domain

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.

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. 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.

Fair use considerations

Some usage of copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder can qualify as fair use in the United States (but not in most other jurisdictions). Improper claims of fair use constitute copyright infringement and are illegal.

As a general rule of thumb, KCpedia allows low-resolution images of copyrighted material if they are unlikely to affect the potential market for the material, are used for the purposes of analysis or criticism, and for which there is no alternative, non- or free-copyrighted replacement available.

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.
3. The image can then be deleted 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 cannot be undeleted. Therefore they are gone permanently unless someone happened to keep a backup.

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 Wikipedia, 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 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.

Placement

See Help:Editing for recommendations on the best markup to use.

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 photo-like maps should be in JPEG format.
• Inline animations should be in animated GIF format.
• Video should be in Ogg/Theora 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.

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 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.

Direct SVG support is implemented as of September 2005. 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.

Size

Uploaded image size

Uploaded files must be smaller than 7 megabytes. The MediaWiki software KCpedia uses can resize images automatically as of version 1.3, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself. Please help ensure that KCpedia content can be reused widely—including as a source for printed media—by uploading photographic images at high resolution. Use the KCpedia 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

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.

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 using smaller sizes via the image tags.

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.

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 General image editor [1] (free, Open source - for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
• Inkscape [2] SVG vector-image editor (free, Open source - for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
• ImageMagick [3] Image conversion and transformation suite (free, Open source - for Linux, Windows, Mac OS 9 or X, and others)
• Paint.NET [4] Image editing software based on the .NET platform. (free, Open source - for Windows)
• Cinelerra [5] Non-linear video editing software (free, Open source - for Linux)
• Audacity [6] General purpose Sound Editor (free, Open source - cross-platform)
• Ardour (audio processor)|Ardour [7] Multichannel digital audio workstation (free, Open source - for Linux, Mac OS X)