There are currently 748 bird articles on Wikipedia which do not have a photograph of a living bird. For the past two months, I have been cataloging all of them and putting them in one project, Bird species which need photographs on Wikipedia.
If any of you have an observation in the project, could you consider changing the photo license to CC0 (Public domain), CC-BY (Attribution) or CC-BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike)?
I would encourage changing to CC-BY or CC0 since CC-BY-SA is not a freely usable license for GBIF.
CC0 is a public domain dedication, which means that you retain no copyright over the images. See here for more information.
CC-BY means that people can tweak and build upon your images, for example, in collages and books, however, they are required to credit you for the original creation.
CC-BY-SA means that if any person modifies your work, they are required to share under CC-BY as well.
This cartoon explains why CC-BY-NC which is the default license for iNat images, is not acceptable on Wikipedia.
To change the photo license, go to the website, press on the “i” button below the image, click on the “Edit License” in the Attribution tab, and change the license.
If you want, please consider selecting the “Make this your default photo license” and “Update past photos” buttons as well.
Not to derail the conversation too much, but the Wikipedia arguments against CC-BY-NC illustrated in that cartoon have always seemed extremely silly to me.
No, some other editor is definitely not going to be able to just go take another photo of some obscure invertebrate I’ve photographed that only two other people have seen alive or, in this case, a decent photo of a rare bird. Especially in the context of iNat, the NC license typically simply completely blocks a given obscure organism’s wiki page from having a photo rather than being an obstacle a “big editor” can just get around by taking their own photos.
On the flipside, the sole argument I ever hear against CC-BY-NC is this concept that it could prevent Wikipedia from being sold at-cost as a DVD or book… which is an unbelievably niche case in the modern day that essentially never happens. If this is truly the only reason to block CC-BY-NC, then Wikipedia is losing many orders of magnitude more than they are gaining from this one little edge case that basically nobody ever uses. It’s the equivalent of the city permanently closing your local library because they’re worried about someone photocopying the books and selling them for profit, except that situation probably happens a lot more than any charity has to worry about the licensing of Wikipedia DVDs in 2026.
Anyways, I get that you are not in control of the Wikipedia licensing policy and that Wikipedia is unlikely to ever change it. I also get that in 2026 where tech companies will just use your photo anyway, photo licensing sometimes seems a bit pointless. But personally, I’m sticking with non-commercial. I only de-license photos to use on wikipedia if I don’t care about them or if I have a better version kept under the NC license.
I guess Wikipedia really takes its copyright policies quite seriously. I think these policies were made in a time (about early 2000s) where the copyright system was more widely enforced..
I also don’t understand what the cartoon is trying to say but then again, that’s the only thing I can tell people if they ask if their CC-BY-NC image is usable on Wikipedia.
NC and SA are simply terrible attributes to but on a CC license. The amount of headache created by trying to figure out whether you are breaking it or not in every specific case is essentially never worth doing it - so in effect, using them is equivalent to saying “I like to boast or feel good about a CC license but I don’t actually don’t wanna provide it”.
Put things on CC-BY, don’t be needlessly annoying. You are loosing nothing.
Yeah, I think that comic does a pretty bad job of arguing against CC-BY-NC, but I also feel quite strongly that CC-BY is a better choice than CC-BY-NC. For one, “non-commercial” use is defined in extremely vague terms to the point where no one has the faintest clue exactly what constitutes it, so as Jan says a lot of people just will not touch it because under the strictest interpretations it covers the vast majority of use cases. Secondly, I think the kinds of commercial use my photos of obscure invertebrates are going to be used for are almost certainly going to range from benign to actively positive and I do not wish to impede them. I think it’s much more likely that my photo is going to be used by, say, a non-profit to fundraise or a field guide to depict a species than it is to be thrown into an Apple ad or plastered on a t shirt.
If you make a living off your photography I think things are very different of course, but I’d strongly encourage those who don’t to at least consider CC-BY.
The real reason Wikipedia doesn’t use CC-BY-NC is because “non-commercial” is hopelessly ambiguous and no one can agree on what it actually means. The licensing of Wikipedia content and images is already complicated enough as it is. Introducing NC would just make things more muddy and complicated. It would also ironically introduce more opportunities for people to exploit the platform for personal financial gain (see Copyleft Trolling).
Wikipedia is non-commercial, but IIRC the decision was made a long time back that it was preferable to let people incorporate material from Wikipedia into commercial projects with attribution rather than forces those projects to use an open license. (The analogy at the time would have been BSD vs GPL licensing.) In practice the most visible manifestation of this seems to be people bundling Wikipedia articles into print-on-demand “books” and selling them, but there may be more laudable niche uses.
[struck comment–that’s what I get for shooting from the hip]
Wikipedia is licensed under CC-BY-SA, a copyleft license like GPL, so they do force projects to use an open license.
Wikipedia itself is non-commercial, but they also want the content to be free to use by others (as long as it is attributed and openly licensed), even for commercial uses. If they started using non-commercial licensed content then the articles themselves would have to themselves be licensed under the more restrictive non-commercial clause, which they see as going against the openness of Wikipedia.
If they started using non-commercial licensed content then the articles themselves would have to themselves be licensed under the more restrictive non-commercial clause
Not sure if I understand this. The articles themselves have a license? If so, how does a non-commercial license of some picture affects whether other pictures in that particular article of the text itself is or isn’t non-commercial as well?
Be it as it may, it’s Wikipedia’s business. I don’t feel like helping someone to make money on my pictures. The argument about “big editors for whom it is easier to make their own photographs” doesn’t hold.
Yes. Every Wikipedia article is available in its entirety under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
It doesn’t affect the other photos individually, it affects the article as a whole. If the photo is part of the article and the photo is licensed under CC-BY-NC then the article can no longer be licensed in its entirely under CC-BY-SA.
