Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/What is Wikimedia Commons?

So let's get right to it. The first contribution type I want to talk about is contributing to Wikimedia Commons. Commons is, like I said, the free library of photos and videos and sound and documents, in PDF form, and even 3D models like STL files and other kinds of 3D models. And everything, absolutely everything of the nearly, what was it, 100 million files or so on Commons these days? All of these files, absolutely all of them, are available as free knowledge: They are either public domain, meaning they no longer have any copyright restrictions, or they were released under a free license that allows any use, including commercial use, so long as you respect the license, which usually involves giving credit and attribution to the author -- to the person who created the work -- and specifying the license. In fact, you have already seen an example of this:

In this slide with the flowers you can see at the bottom right, that I have done this, that I have respected the license of this file and have given credit to a person named Roland Fischer from Zurich. I don't know Roland Fischer. I never spoke to him. I never emailed him. I have made no contact with him. He's probably not aware that I'm using this image that he has contributed, and that is as it should be! That is the whole point of releasing things under a free license, so that I don't have to ask for permission. The permission is already given to me in the free license!

"License", after all, is a synonym for the word permission. That's what license means. It is permitting me to use this piece of media, in this case an image, provided that I give credit and specify that this is a free license. This is what these letters mean: CC BY-SA 3.0 -- Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0. And here is the name of the author. In this case, I even included the file name, so that if one of you thinks wow, that's a great picture of flowers; I would also like to use it in my own presentation, you can find that particular file on Commons using this information that I provided.

So that was just parenthetically, an example of how the availability of multimedia under a free license enables reuse, what's called "frictionless reuse". I just needed a photo of a lot of flowers. I found this photo, and I used it. I didn't have to wait for permission, make any communication. It was available for reuse immediately! The power of free licenses. So Commons is full of millions and millions of files that we can make free reuse of.

The content on Commons should be educational, which is taken in a very broad sense, not meaning only what you are taught in school, what's in your textbooks, but anything that could potentially be useful in teaching something, or illustrating some encyclopedic article, or even a travel guide. Anything that could serve a purpose that's related somehow to conveying information or teaching something. If you think about it, that covers a whole lot of things.

For example, a picture of, I don't know, fried rice! May not sound particularly educational; It's not something you associate with the education system. But if anyone wants to know what does fried rice look like, or how to make fried rice, that picture could be useful. It could be useful to illustrate a recipe. It could be useful to illustrate this kind of rice as distinct from this other kind of rice. And that was just a simple example off the top of my head. So really, a lot of things could come under this notion of educational. One thing that probably isn't educational is pictures of yourself with things like the Eiffel Tower. Those are probably not needed on Commons, because Commons already has tons and tons of pictures of the Eiffel Tower. And there's no special need to use a picture of you, so your vacation photos or family photos are generally not something we need, unless they actually focus on the objects themselves. The monument, the nature spot, the animal, the plant, rather than on you and something. However, if you, for example, put on a traditional costume, or if you record a video of yourself performing some dance moves, that could be useful as an illustration of that costume or that dance move. So it's not like you cannot upload a photo of yourself to Commons. You absolutely can. Anyway, that was a little bit about what does educational mean in terms of the scope of Commons, what's acceptable on Commons. And then when you upload something to Commons, you need to describe it properly: to say, what are we looking at? What does this picture show? It may be obvious to you, but it won't be obvious to the next person looking at this photo or video or file.

You need to specify who the author is, what the date of creation is, and what license it is under. Once you upload it, you should organize it into categories. Categories are the main way that things are found on Commons. Because when you have dozens and dozens of millions of files, it's very difficult to just wade through a long list. So you need to organize things, and the way they're organized on Commons today is by categories and subcategories so that you could, for example, have a category Nigeria, and then under category Nigeria, you could have a category Lagos State. And under that you could have Lagos City and then districts within Lagos. But you could also have, in parallel, categories that have a subject like Buildings in Lagos, versus, Animals in Lagos State. You could invent all kinds of sub-categories and structure. And that can be a little complicated. But when you upload a file, make sure you give it at least one category, at least one general description of what sort of thing this is, so that it can be found. There are lots of tools available for working with categories.

I'm not going to click all of the links in this presentation, but you will be able to go through it and pursue the methods that you find interesting and click on all the links. For example, here there is a link leading to tools related to Commons, which we will not cover right now.

When you upload a file to Commons, like any other wiki, you should listen to and respect any feedback you get. It is expected that you may not get it right immediately, that you may make mistakes. That's okay, as long as you are attentive to the feedback, and you correct the mistakes, and do better, and stop repeating them. That's as on any wiki. And in Commons, the most important thing, the most important rule and the most challenging perhaps, is the copyright restrictions. You can avoid most of the difficulty and complexity of copyright if you stick to uploading your own works. Your own works are generally yours to share and upload.

We won't get into all the complexities of copyright. A future module may be available later this year or the next, going into a lot of detail about free licenses and copyright and freedom of panorama and other people's works, and when you might be able to use them. But we're not covering that today.