Commons:Press releases/Picture of the Day RSS

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Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Wikimedia Commons, the wiki respository for freely-licensed educational media, is happy to announce the creation of a RSS feed for its popular "Picture of the Day".

About Wikimedia Commons

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Wikimedia Commons is a free media repository, managed by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It uses a wiki like Wikipedia and is run entirely by volunteers. Its content consists of volunteer-donated freely licensed media, as well as some government works that are deemed public domain, and aged works whose term of copyright has expired. It also emphasises multilingual access.

Wikimedia Commons was founded in 2004 and in a little over two years acquired over one million photographs, diagrams, maps, audio files, videos and animations. As of December 2008, it has over 3.6 million files.

About the Picture of the Day

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The Picture of the Day is a tradition that began less than a month after Wikimedia Commons' founding. Since the beginning of 2007, all Pictures of the Day are first certified as Quality Images or Featured Pictures, representing the best of the best in freely licensed media content available today.

The Picture of the Day appears on the Main Page, and Wikimedia Commons users have also been able to see the updated image each day on their userpage. Now, the Picture of the Day has been made easily accessible to all internet users.

How to access the Picture of the Day

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There are several ways to access the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day:

Using an RSS feed

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An RSS reader is a piece of software or a website where users provide the URLs of RSS feeds (typically of blogs), and are able to access "automatically updated" content from the feeds. There are many web-based and desktop RSS readers from which to choose.

Use and reuse of the Pictures of the Day

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All Pictures of the Day are available under the terms of free licenses, which means they guarantee certain rights for re-users of media:

  • right to use the work for any purpose, including commercially
  • right to use the work without contacting the author for permission first (although notification is often quite nice!)
  • right to change and modify the work
  • right to display, print and disseminate the work.

Some licenses or terms of agreement also carry certain responsibilities, typically:

  • responsibility to attribute the work to the author ("attribution")
  • responsibility to license any modifications under the terms of the same license ("share alike")
  • responsibility to provide a full copy of the license when disseminating or displaying the work.

Users are advised to check the text of relevant licenses to determine what their responsibilities are, when making non-personal uses of a work. When re-using an image, generally these items are necessary: link to the original image on Wikimedia Commons, attribute the author and link to the license text. License questions can be asked at the Commons:Help desk.

Websites are strongly encouraged to mirror copies of the Picture of the Day locally, if displaying it on high traffic pages.

New contributors

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New contributions of educational works are always welcomed! People interested in donating their work are encouraged to read the First steps guide for tips as to how to go about this.

Spread the word!

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Wikimedia Commons actively encourages reuse of all its material. Please pass on information about how to access our Picture of the Day service to anyone you think might find it interesting.