#Copyright and #GLAMWiki

Pictures on #Commons have two purposes; the use as illustrations on Wikimedia projects and, the use as illustrations elsewhere. Most of these pictures place requirements on the user like attribution. Many people do not bother with such stuffiness. Many Wikipedians can get quite incensed about that particularly when the media is used for a commercial purpose.

Magnus Manske did a great job making it easy to use pictures from Commons. As you can see, nice icons that provide different ways of using the wealth that Commons has to offer.

When you use a picture "on the web" like I did recently in this blog post, you are provided with a neat attribution to the copyright holder and with a nice indication of the applicable license.

This is absolutely fabulous but still, there are a few things that would make it absolutely awesome..

• Show the license information on the Wikimedia projects as well
• Having these share options on the wikis of all Wikimedia projects
• Having the copyright message in the language of the Wiki, or a language that can be selected
• Including information about the GLAM that has it in its collection

For our GLAM partners the traffic numbers of their collection on our projects is important as is the number of articles their pictures are used in. References to the GLAM who has something in collection is important to us to us and vital to them.

We are adamant that citations are used to assert the validity of facts. It is how we provide a reason why our articles can be trusted. A similar assertion is needed for illustrations; Jimbogoesswimming.jpg is not the 1873 image by William-Adolphe Bouguereau that can be found in the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

This picture does not attribute the Clark and neither does the one on the article about nymphs on the Esperanto Wikipedia. It is relatively easy to recognise the GLAM that conserve a work like this. Such recognition makes a massive difference to our GLAM partners who struggle to maintain their collection and who need recognition to justify their partnership with us.
Thanks,
      GerardM