Wikipedia:GLAM/Natural History Museum and Science Museum/Image donation

How to share your images with the world using an open license

Taking photos in the museum today? If you would like to share your images with the world please upload your images under an open license so that they can be used on open knowledge projects like Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia containing more than 20 million articles in 280 languages giving information to 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views. It is written entirely by volunteers, it is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. The aim of Wikipedia is to see a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Why?

Uploading your images to Commons connects them with other information giving them context and extra information including translation of the information into other languages.
It's interesting to share your knowledge with other people, it's an opportunity to be part of educating people all over the world.
Lots of people will see the images, there are over 280 different language Wikipedias and the images can be used on all of them, you can even track where they're being used.
Allowing people to share, use, combine and even build upon works can give for better results than people working individually.
You can be part of an exciting development making use of the open source idea.
Contribution is what makes Wikipedia a great, informative site.

How?

If you have a Flickr or Picasa account that you would prefer to use simply change your photos to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Uploading images to Wikipedia is done through a central site called Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org). Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world, it has many projects including Wikipedia.

Go to commons.wikimedia.org and click create an account
Go to Upload page (under participate on the right hand side of the screen)
Select the files which you'd like to upload
Set appropriate file names describing the photos and add a description and a category
Click on the agreement to release your images

Tips

Don't upload images of copyrighted materials
If you already have an account on another Wikimedia project e.g. Wikipedia you can use that account.
When creating a Wikimedia account you don't need to reveal your offline identity, many users use a pseudonym.