Sensibilisation/information campaign towards all user to help Wikipedia with the licence of their pictures

General
1

Platform(s), INaturalist as a whole

Description of need:
Make users more aware of the Picture Licences by promoting the use of CC-BY Licences to help Wikipedia.

Feature request details:
Hello, I’m a French amateur mycologist which takes pictures but I also work a lot on the French Wikipedia to put up to date and create articles about mushroom species, and what we need the most is available images to illustrate correctly our articles, but because we can only use CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA we have a lot of restriction to take into account when we look for images to upload to Wikimedia, most images on the web not fitting the correct licence. And even if there are indeed people who understand Licences and put them accordingly, a lot of people, even most of them are not really sure of what all of that means and what it could be used for, most of the pictures we find are CC-BY-NC, especially in INaturalist which is great for finding pictures with the correct licence, but they are always a minority.

Now I know that It’s explained in the settings pages in INaturalist that certain licences work for Wikipedia, but still, most of the pictures here have the basis to be in CC-BY-NC, which we cannot use. I think it would be great if INat could do like a sensibilisation mail or message to everyone to remind them that choosing other licences than this one for their images would be a very good thing for Wikipedia and that it would help the general interest, because, concerning my experience with people, they mostly put this licence (because its the default licence in INat) as a baseline because they do not really understand the subtilities between each licence, and when they tell me that they would be happy to let me use for Wikipedia, they seem surprised when I tell them that I cannot because they’re not in the correct licence, and once I explain them what each licence means, they’re most of the time inclined to change it.

So I think there is a problem of uncomprehension about the Licences and it would be amazing for our work on Wikipedia if INat could helps us by making a sensibilisation announcement about it !

6 Likes
2

This was originally posted in Feature Requests but I moved it to General as it’s not a request for functionality.

3

Alright, thanks

4

There are a lot of existing threads on usage of iNat content on Wikipedia that may be helpful, a couple examples (but there are many more):

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/250k-inat-images-uploaded-to-wikimedia-commons/73237

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-to-help-improve-inaturalist-taxon-pages-through-wikipedia/2680

1 Like
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You might also read the related (but lengthy) discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/a-case-for-changing-the-default-license-to-not-include-a-nc-clause/18690

3 Likes
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You shouldn’t assume that iNatters using CC-BY-NC don’t understand the ramifications for Wikipedia. I’m a regular user and supporter of Wikipedia. And I understand the differences in licensing uses. I am one of the iNatters who has made a positive choice to keep all my photos as CC-BY-NC. The issue of photo unavailability on Wikipedia for certain licenses is, IMHO, a Wikipedia characteristic, not an iNat problem.

I note that a given CC-BY-NC photo on iNat is accessible and usable with attribution from iNaturalist. While Wikipedia may have a wider user base, a pathway to a given photo is always available to anyone with an iNat account.

4 Likes
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OP made it clear that part of the reason they’re bringing this up is because of specific experiences with iNat users being surprised that CC-BY-NC doesn’t allow use on Wikipedia.

1 Like
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Exactly, for some there are people who understand what they’re doing, but from my experience, they’re more or less a minority

1 Like