Sharing photographs on Wikipedia

I hope this is the right place for this.

I'm starting to take photos of the MBTA in Boston for Wikipedia. I'd like to encourage anyone else who is taking pictures of trains and subway systems to do the same... by putting them on Wikipedia, you help to preserve them for future generations, people from other cultures and help educate people about the history of railways and subway systems.

I would be happy to help anyone upload their images to Wikipedia, if they give permission.

In order to ensure Wikipedia can reproduce your images, they ask that you either dedicated them to the public domain, or license them in such a way that they can be used with Wikipedia's licensed content. If you're using Flickr, this is really easy.. http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/ and select either the 'Attribution' or 'Attribution-ShareAlike' license...

I'm also happy to field questions on doing this licensing for non-Flickr users.

I'd like to take you up on your open invite and ask: How does someone that's not involved with flickr submit to Wikipedia?

You can just upload them from your own computer. When you do that, they'll ask you how you have permission to share them with the world. Check off the box that says "I am the photographer". Done!

How does one actually put photos on Wikipedia? Is there some database where we can upload large numbers of MBTA photos besides the MBTA article itself? It seems elementary but I guess I'm not very wiki-literate.

Wikipedia is not a photo-sharing site. Anything you upload should be in support of an article, and an article only needs a small handful of photos.

I like Flickr, myself. It's cheap, easy to use, and there's plenty of ways to let other people know about your photos.

OK, that's what I thought. Flickr it is.

Post a link to your photos -- now I'm curious!

I do not post my photographs to Wikipedia because their insistence on the use of a Creative Commons license would allow anyone to use my images for any purpose. I'm not naïve – I know people routinely download images all the time and that many younger folks have no respect for the rights of the original photographer – but I do prefer to maintain some semblance of my original copyright protections in the event someone uses one of my images in a way that I have serious concerns about.

Jim D.

RussNelson wrote:Post a link to your photos -- now I'm curious!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frnfinch/