File talk:Class 303 at Wemyss Bay (April 1984).jpg

Commons - why?

Why do people insist on putting my photographs on Commons.

If I had thought that this image deserved to be on Commons I would have put them there. I do not believe this picture merits being on Commons.

I will have to consider whether future pictures should even be uploaded to en.wikipedia Pencefn (talk)

Hello, Pencefn (if of course anonymous user 158.152.180.143 is you). You should be aware that releasing your works on English Wikipedia under the free multiple license GFDL + CC-BY-2.5 you grant rights to everybody on world to use your works for any purpose (potentially commercial, as well) and for further distribution and modification. Moving from English Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons is a form of such redistribution and your rights were not infringed by the uploader:

• The new distribution of your work is made under the terms of the same licenses, as you've originally wanted it to be.
• The new distribution makes attribution to your authorship, by providing your nickname and link to your homepage.

Apart of this, nothing else should concern you, because it was Your personal will and decision to license it freely.

You should know that Wikimedia Commons is not a foreign website to English Wikipedia and the rest wikis, as it is maintained by the same people who maintain EN WP. Wikimedia Commons is just the central repository of free multimedia content which falls in the project scope of all wikipedias and their sister projects. The illustrative value of the image and its free license are absolutely enough prerequisites that it may be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and deleted locally on EN WP. This hsould not bother you in any way, since it will continue to be available - not only on EN WP but on every other wiki, as well. The software feature is that images that are uploaded locally on EN WP may only be used there, and if needed to be used on another wiki, DE WP say, the image needs another local upload, etc which wastes lots of resources. Having in mind that it's published by You under free license, it's much more economical and smarter to have it on one central place that will serve all wikis, rather than multiply uploaded. This is not related to "merits" or so, but only related to whether an image is free and useful.

And yes, consider for the future to directly upload your free works in Commons. For this sake, you'd be much more facilitated if you perform en:Special:MergeAccount on your account and be able to log in automatically and get a consistent identity across all projects of the Foundation. Read more about it from here: meta:Help:Unified login. For your further fair use uploads, however, you should keep uploading locally on EN WP, Commons does not tolerate fair use but free content only.

Should you need further help and information, feel free to contact me on my talk page and read some of the relevant documents in Template:Welcome. Regards, →Spiritia 15:56, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I will have think about this. --Stewart ^(talk) 20:53, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Hello again. I saw your edit stating "for use on English Wikipedia only" and I'd like to again explain to you that this is a non-sense and I reverted your edit.

Ten months ago, on 1 September 2007 you chose to release this image under free license GFDL + CC-BY-SA. This release is irrevocable and lasts forever. Consciously or not (seemingly not), you have granted rights to everybody to use your work, to make copies and modifications, to publish it elsewhere. Now, any attempts to restrict the usage of this image are impossible, what's given for free remains free forever. I'd advise you to learn more about free licenses and carefully decide for the future which licenses would suit you best, if any. For already uploaded images however you may only relicense them in the direction to a make them freer, and NOT more restrictive than before. For instance if you have once chosen to license a work under GFDL (reserving some rights like copyleft and attribution), you MAY now decide to relicense it to public domain (thus giving up even these rights). But you MAY NOT go the other way round because this will infringe the freedoms of potential content reusers who have made use of your works in the meanwhile, aware that they use a free content. Please, make sure that you understand the meaning of free content.

Have in mind that if you want to contribute to Wikipedia with personally produced illustrative content, only a free license is option. You may chose among several available free licenses, and the major decision making and mindset forming criteria are listed here: freedomdefined:Licenses#Criteria for choosing a license. But you must forget of statements like "for educational purposes", "for Wikipedia only", these are a huge irrelevancy. On every page that you open for editing, is written If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it. Same holds for images, as well. I do hope that after reading the links which I gave you, you'd end up with a clearer vision what can and what cannot be done in the situation. Because this will apply also to all your uploads made up-to-date and maybe will influence your personal licensing policy for the future. By the way, the multiple license GFDL + CC-BY-SA that you have chosen (or hitted by chance :-) ) is one of the best licensing options as for you as a copyright holder, as well as for all other downstream users of your content.

Should you have further questions, feel free to contact me again (or directly write here). →Spiritia 07:19, 1 July 2008 (UTC)