This substituted template thingy will hopefully make life easier for more-experienced editors to notify less-experienced editors who are having image issues - uploading errant images, uploading images under copyright, etc onto Wikipedia pages. I have had the basic code on my User pages at User:Shearonink/useful links since 2011. For attribution's sake, I do not recall if this code is something I had written myself or if someone else wrote it before me.

Images instructions edit

To use a picture on Wikipedia, we need permission from whoever owns it.

  • If it is your OWN image - meaning you created it yourself (not, for example, from a book or magazine you happen to own) - then you can just upload it at "Commons", saying "It is entirely my own work" - see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Upload .
  • If it is NOT YOURS, and you are uploading it straight onto Wikipedia without checking about the image's copyright status - Stop. Seriously...please stop. Wikipedia cannot use it. Wikipedia cannot use images that are just taken off of other sources on the internet, we take copyright & people's ownership of their own work - like photos - very seriously. Refer to Guidelines for images for a short summation & explanation of these guidelines.
  • If it is NOT YOURS, and you are in contact with the image's owner, then the owner can give permission in two ways;
A) They could put it on a website (flickr, or their own site) with an appropriate licence, such as "Public Domain" or "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike" (that is an option in flickr)
B) They could email us permission. You could ask them to do that, by sending them an email saying something like:
"Hi, I've written a page on Wikipedia, and I'd really like to add a picture - but as Wikipedia is FREE, we can only use freely-licensed pictures. If you have any images which you can give permission for, please send me an email back with the text below, and the picture(s) attached."
-Then add a copy of this: http://enwp.org/user:chzz/help/myboilerplate (having filled the form out)
-And send the email (attached picture file + completed form) to: permissions-commons@wikimedia.org

If any of your questions about how to insert images into an article aren't answered in these instructions, additional information is available at the following links:
Easy tutorial for how to upload images
Easy list of Image Do's & Do NOTs
Noticeboard for media copyright questions - "Ask the Expert" for when you need assistance

Hope this helps, --~~