Commons:Biodiversity Heritage Library
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is one of the largest collections of digitized illustrations of animals, plants and other forms of life (i.e. biodiversity) on the internet. This project hopes to facilitate a partnership between the BHL and the Wikimedia Commons to their mutual benefit. In order to convince the BHL to commit scarce resources to this task, we want to start by showing them the value of the Wikimedia Commons as a facilitator in making their content widely available and as a way to enhance their brand.
Use {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}} in the source field of Wikimedia Commons uploads to add them to the Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library category, which currently has 215 items. This page also has advice on copyright tags to use for such content.
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[edit] Current tasks
 Pending tasks for Biodiversity Heritage Library: |
edit this list - add to watchlist - purge | |
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[edit] Copyrights
Many of its images are in the public domain (for instance, anything published in the US before January 1, 1923); others are currently available under a non-commercial Creative Commons license (i.e. CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0); unfortunately, non-commercial licenses cannot be imported into the Wikimedia Commons. As part of this project, we hope to lobby the BHL to convince its data providers to release more of their information in similarly open formats. BHL's copyright information is available online.
For BHL content you believe is in the public domain, use Help:Public domain to judge which BHL template to use. In many cases, if the author died over a hundred years ago (i.e. before 1912 CE), you can use {{PD-old-100}} as the license for your image. If the image appears to have been "touched up" after scanning, you may additionally use the {{PD-Scan}} template (see Commons:When to use the PD-scan tag for more information). Thus, the ideal tag for BHL images whose creator has died more than a hundred years ago is probably {{PD-Scan|PD-old-100}}.
Note that you cannot use {{PD-Art}}, since that license is meant to be used of photographs of public domain images, not scans. Note also that the copyright status of unpublished content is extremely complicated, and should be treated carefully.
[edit] Goals
- To show that uploading content to the Wikimedia Commons would be a valuable step for BHL to undertake, by creating a template (in the style of Template:KIT-license) which can be placed on Wikimedia Commons images already taken from the BHL.
- To identify content from BHL which would be of direct benefit to Wikipedia by matching requests for images on the English Wikipedia's requested photos of animals with illustrations in the BHL.
- To standardize the licenses of BHL images in the Commons, and to encourage new uploaders to use the correct licenses (for instance, by ensuring that BHL images are not erroneously tagged with {{PD-Art}}).
- To lobby BHL to lobby their book providers to release more content under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licenses (instead of CC-BY-NC-SA, as is the current practice) so that they can be used in Wikipedia and its related projects.
