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| POLICY INDEX |
| General Rules |
| General Rules |
| Standard Rules |
| Blocking Rules |
| Attribution |
| Policy and Guidelines |
| Wiki Policy |
| Spoiler Policy |
| Discord Policy |
| Image Policy |
| User Page Policy |
| User Treatment Policy |
| Vandalism Policy |
| File Policy |
| Wiki Guideline |
| Manual of Style |
| Layout Guide |
| Terminology Guide |
| Administration |
| List of Administrators |
- This page sets out the policies towards images—including format, content, and copyright issues.
Short Version
- Official images must be properly sourced and categorized according to the source.
- All images must be properly licensed very important
- Images should be properly named and uploaded in the proper format.
- Unofficial images are only allowed on personal pages. Unused unofficial images will be deleted.
- Duplicates or images of scenes that take places within seconds of each other should not be uploaded.
- Images should be placed where they are relevant, but should not obstruct navigation or make the page look unaesthetic.
- All images put in infobox must be high-quality (PNG will be preferred of high-quality JPG) images.
Full Version
Before uploading an image, please check Special:ListFiles to see if the image that you want to upload is already on the wiki. All images are categorized by source, so finding duplicates should not be hard and we do not need repeats.
If you have confirmed that the image is not present on the wiki, then the following guidelines depend on whether the image you want to upload is an official image or fanart/unofficial image.
Image Naming
Infoboxes
- Character
- Manga
Charactername Portrait.png
- Colored
Charactername Colored Portrait.png
- If Character exists in Oneshot - Not colored
Charactername Oneshot Portrait.png
- If Character exists in Oneshot - Colored
Charactername Oneshot Colored Portrait.png
Volume Covers
Volume #.png
Chapter Covers
- If Japanese only:
JP Chapter #.png
- If English Cover exists:
ENG Chapter #.png
Portals
Character Profile.png
Note: File dimensions should be 750x750- Manga releases are recommended for character portraits if an illustration does not exist in the mentioned media, use Manga, Anime, Game, Collaboration crops instead.
Identifying usable images
Copyright and licensing
Before you upload an image, make sure that the image falls in one of the four categories:
- Own work: You own all rights to the image, usually meaning that you created it entirely yourself. In case of a photograph or screenshot, you must also own the copyright for all copyright-protected items (e.g. statue or app) that appear in it.
- Freely licensed: You can prove that the copyright holder has released the image under an acceptable free license (example, see below for details). Note that images that are licensed for use only on Wikipedia, or only for non-commercial or educational use, or under a license that doesn't allow for the creation of modified/derived works, are unsuitable. Important note: just because you did not have to pay money for the image does not mean that it is "free content" or acceptable for use on Wikipedia. The vast majority of images on the internet are copyrighted and cannot be used here – even if there is not a copyright notice, it is automatically copyrighted from the moment of creation. When in doubt, do not upload copyrighted images.
- Public domain: You can prove that the image is in the public domain, i.e. free of all copyrights.
- Fair use/non-free: You believe that the image meets the special conditions for non-free content, which exceptionally allow the use of unlicensed material, and you can provide an explicit non-free use rationale explaining why and how you intend to use it.
User-created images
Wikipedia encourages users to upload their own images. All user-created images must be licensed under a free license, such as a Creative Commons license, or released into the public domain, which removes all copyright and licensing restrictions. When licensing an image, it is common practice to multi-license under both GFDL and a Creative Commons license.
Diagrams and other images
User-made images can also include the recreation of graphs, charts, drawings, and maps directly from available data, as long as the user-created format does not mimic the exact style of the original work. Technical data is uncopyrightable, lacking creativity, but the presentation of data in a graph or chart can be copyrighted, so a user-made version should be sufficiently different in presentation from the original to remain free. In such cases, it is required to include verification of the source(s) of the original data when uploading such images. Additionally, user-made images may be wholly original. In such cases, the image should be primarily serving an educational purpose, and not as a means of self-promotion of the user's artistic skills. The subject to be illustrated should be clearly identifiable in context, and should not be overly stylized.
Free licenses
There are several licenses that meet the definition of "free" here. Several Creative Commons (CC) license alternatives are available. Licenses which restrict the use of the media to non-profit or educational purposes only (i.e. non-commercial use only), or which are given permission to appear only on Wikipedia, are not free enough for Wikipedia's usages or goals and will be deleted. In short, Wikipedia media (with the exception of "fair use" media—see below) should be as "free" as Wikipedia's content—both to keep Wikipedia's own legal status secure and to allow as much re-use of Wikipedia content as possible. For example, Wikipedia can accept images under CC-BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike) as a free license, but not CC-BY-SA-NC (Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial).
Public domain
Public domain images are not copyrighted, and copyright law does not restrict their use in any way. Wikipedia pages, including non-English language pages, are hosted on a server in the United States, so US law governs whether a Wikipedia image is in the public domain.
Fair-use/Non-free images
Some usage of copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder can qualify as fair use in the United States (but not in most other jurisdictions). However, since Wikipedia aims to be a free-content encyclopedia, not every image that qualifies as fair-use may be appropriate. Use of copyrighted material under an invalid claim of a non-free rationale constitutes copyright infringement and is illegal. Media which are mistagged as non-free or are a flagrant copyright violation can be removed on sight. Editors who notice correctable errors in non-free tags or rationales are urged to fix them, if able. Voluntarily fixing such problems is helpful to Wikipedia, though many errors may be impossible to fix, such as the original source or copyright owner. A user may be banned for repeatedly uploading material which is neither free nor follows the required for non-free images.
Watermarks, credits, titles, and distortions
Free images should not be watermarked, distorted, have any credits or titles in the image itself or anything else that would hamper their free use, unless, of course, the image is intended to demonstrate watermarking, distortion, titles, etc. and is used in the related article. Exceptions may be made for historic images when the credit or title forms an integral part of the composition. Historical images in the public domain sometimes are out of focus, display dye dropouts, dust or scratches or evidence of the printing process used. All photo credits should be in a summary on the image description page.
Uploading images
Privacy disclosure statement: for image file formats JPG and PNG all EXIF metadata in the uploaded image is publicly visible on all Wikipedia and associated websites. This includes your location, the date and time the image was recorded and the make and model of your camera or smartphone.
Generally:
- Drawings, icons, logos, maps, flags and other such images are preferably uploaded in SVG format as vector images. Images with large, simple, and continuous blocks of color which are not available as SVG should be in PNG format.
- Software screenshots should be in PNG format.
- Photos and scanned images should be in JPEG format, though a PNG may be useful as well for simple subjects (where PNG would result in a smaller file without degrading quality).
- TV- and movie screenshots should be in JPEG format.
- Inline animations should be in animated GIF format.
- Video should be in Ogg/Theora or WebM format.
Generally speaking, you should not contribute images consisting solely of formatted or unformatted text, tables, or mathematical formulas. In most cases these can instead be typed directly into an article in wiki markup (possibly using MediaWiki's special syntax for tables, math). This will make the information easier to edit, as well as make it accessible to users of screen readers and text-based browsers.
Images containing text
If you create an image that contains text, please also upload a version without any text. It will help Wikipedians translate your image into other languages. SVG images can contain text in multiple languages in a single file (using a switch element).
Cropping
Within reason, crop an image to remove irrelevant areas. But do not "throw away information"; for example, if a photograph shows George Washington and Abraham Lincoln together at a birthday party, and the article you're working on requires only Lincoln, consider uploading both the original image and the crop of Lincoln. Also, if an image has captions as an inherent part of the artwork (as with book illustrations, early cartoons, many lithographs, etc.), don't crop them, or upload the original uncropped version as well.