Another milestone was reached today as the 250,000th image from iNaturalist was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the project that serves as the central repository for all image, audio and video files used on Wikimedia projects. This is a significant increase from the first 100k images uploaded over the fifteen year period from April, 2008 to July, 2023. All of this was a result of the thousands of users that applied a compatible sharing license (CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA) to their images on iNaturalist - thank you!
There are now over 37,600 iNaturalist images featured on English Wikipedia (up from 6,500 in July, 2023) and an additional 116,000 iNat images are used on 189 other Wikimedia projects. In total, over 60,000 distinct images are being used in Wikimedia projects (all languages).
Once again, we thank all the iNaturalist users that have shared their images for use on Wikimedia projects!
Yes, I had seen those, but they do not answer the question of describing the differences between the seven licence choices available. What I was looking to find was an image that shows which licenses can be shared with GBIF and Wikimedia, such as can be seen on the individual license selections at Account Settings>>Content & Display>>scroll down to licenses where you will see a little blue box for Wikimedia (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) and/or a green box for GBIF (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-NC).
So you can immediately establish a communication channel, and make the help pages better for everyone!
I was really impressed with this. In my experience, with webpage surveys like this, if you click NO, they usually just say something like, “That’s too bad, thanks for your feedback, sucks to be you!”
This is what we always say when experts criticize iNat. This is your chance to make things better for everyone!
Keep in mind that CC-BY-SA will enable Wikimedia Commons but disable GBIF. If you want your images to be available to both Wikimedia Commons and GBIF, choose CC0 or CC-BY.
I can see on the file information page where an individual image is being used (all projects), but I do not know how to filter the search by usage, or how to compile that information into one list.
You do have a lot of great images shared on Wikimedia Commons though, many of which are used on Wikipedia.
Yes I’m just clicking through to the file image. There is one editor on Wikipedia who lets me know when my image is being used but I can see several that are used that I didn’t know about. Anyway it’s very cool, great to contribute.
Proud to have contributed to that 250k, both in uploading others’ images to Commons and putting mine on there too :] Wiki Loves iNaturalist is a great website for helping with this, and actually how I got introduced to iNat in the first place!
Succinctly, Wikipedia commons licensing policy states:
Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content, that is, images and other media files that are not subject to copyright restrictions which would prevent them being used by anyone, anytime, for any purpose.
Non-commercial would be a restriction on “purpose” that they simply won’t accept.
Primarily Wikipedia is itself meant to be freely licensed (and is mostly licensed under CC BY-SA) which CC BY-NC would be incompatible with. Note the NC clause has faced a fair amount of criticism because “commercial use” is left extremely vague and no one seems to know what it means. I personally license everything under CC BY rather than CC BY-NC because I care way more about, say, a conservation group being able to use my photos for fundraising (which might legally qualify as commercial use) than I am scared that Coca-Cola is gonna use one of my photos in an ad (which seems extremely unlikely) or that some dodgy site is going to start selling shirts with my photos (really doubt they’ll care much about the license either way).
That being said, if you aren’t comfortable with the permissiveness of a CC-BY license a CC-BY-NC is still much much better than “All rights reserved”
(This is also not to shame any professional photographers who reserve all rights. If photography is your livelihood I think it is totally justified to retain full copyright of your photos)
I just changed the licensing on all my images and observations to CC-BY. Is there now a step I can take to bulk upload dozens/hundreds of images at a time to Wikimedia Commons, or is it important to have a more targeted approach of uploading one image at a time?
