User:Vahurzpu/Photos of BLPs social media campaign

Wikipedia's social media accounts should post, in some fashion, clearly about how notable people can release images of themselves under free licenses, so that they can be incorporated into Wikipedia pages. This will hopefully directly inspire some people to do so, but also provide an authoritative explanation that other editors can refer back to.

Background
Wikipedia's readers want pages to have images. Back when the article feedback tool was active, one of the most common intelligible requests was for pages to have more images. However, copyright is an issue, in particular for living people. Under English Wikipedia's non-free content criteria, pictures of living people are rarely acceptable under fair use, and the availability of quality freely licensed images is hit-and-miss. As a result, many pictures of living people on Wikipedia have been recognized as bad.

On the other side, article subjects do want photos of themselves. When people do have photos, they don't like them; I searched Twitter for phrases like "my wikipedia photo" and "my wikipedia picture" and the messages are almost universally negative. Several of those are accompanied with vaguely worded permission statements, suggesting that people would be willing to release freely licensed or public domain images of themselves, if only they knew the right magical incantation legal terminology.

Some editors have had success asking article subjects for images, but ultimately we're just random people on the internet. It's also counter-intuitive: Wikipedia's COI policies strongly discourage people from directly editing pages about them, but there are only a handful of people famous enough that a quality picture the subject preferred would be rejected.

Details
There are three ways for people to get their images on Commons:


 * 1) Upload it to Commons directly
 * 2) Publish it on a website/social media with a caption along the lines of "I took the photo/own the copyright to the photo and release it under CC-BY-SA 4.0"
 * 3) Send an email to  and go through the VRT (c:Commons:Wikimedia OTRS release generator walks you through this process)

@Wikipedia has already posted about #1, but it's the least useful as Commons already has tons of people with brand new accounts uploading pictures of famous people, and lots of them get deleted as copyvios because there's zero evidence that they're actually the copyright holder. #2 and #3 are better options. I asked a Commons admin who recommended #3 as the most reliable method (since going through the VRT means that someone will definitely upload it), though #2 isn't bad.

It's also true that article subjects might not understand relevant copyright law and will might assert that they own the copyright to photos that other people took of them without an explicit copyright assignment. Therefore, I think it might be a good idea to either (a) submit selfies, or (b) be really explicit that the photographer needs to send in the image, rather than the subject, absent a written copyright assignment.

Draft language
If there's a Wikipedia article about you or someone you know, it may or may not have a photo, and that photo may or may not be any good. You can fix this! We always appreciate having high-quality, up-to-date photographs of people. However, not every photo found on the internet will do. Wikipedia is free for anyone to copy, distribute, and modify for any purpose, and we try our hardest to make sure the same is true of the images we use to illustrate articles. Therefore, with very few exceptions, the photos we use for living people have to be photos that are free to use and reuse. This isn't true by default, but whoever owns the copyright on the photo can allow it. To make sure that a photo is usable, first you need to find out who owns the copyright. This is almost always the photographer, unless a written contract says otherwise. If it's a selfie, this is easy: it's you. Ask them to put the photograph in some official place, labeled as "Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License". This makes it legally clear that anyone is free to copy, distribute, and modify the photo. Alternatively, you can ask the copyright holder to go through the steps at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimedia_OTRS_release_generator so that @WikiCommons has a private record that the image is properly licensed. Once that's taken care of, you can use the "Talk" tab at the top of the article to leave a note to the page's editors about the new image, and watch the article improve!