Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/100,000 Wellcome Images of the history of medicine

PUBLISHED ON THE WIKIMEDIA BLOG ON JAN. 20, 2015 AT 10PM PT.

Title ideas

• Wellcome Library donates 100,000 medical images to Wikimedia Commons
• Wellcome donates 100,000 medical images to Wikimedia Commons
• 100,000 medical images donated by Wellcome Library
• 100,000 Wellcome Images of the history of medicine

Body

This image of a female blow fly (Chrysomya chloropyga) is part of the Wellcome Library's
medical image collection, now freely available on Wikimedia Commons.
Drawing by Amedeo John Engel Terzi. From Wellcome Library, licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

The Wellcome Library has donated over 100,000 images on medical history, which have now been uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The high resolution photographs and scans are used to illustrate a wide range of Wikipedia articles such as disease, art history, cartoons, sexuality and biographies.

Wellcome Images provide free public access to their digital collection online, covering topics from medical and social history to current healthcare and biomedical science. Wellcome Images is part of the Wellcome Collection, with an extensive range of manuscripts, archives, paintings, prints and drawings. See http://wellcomeimages.org.

The Wellcome Library are thrilled with the mass upload of the historical Wellcome Images to Wiki commons, and would like to thank Wikimedia UK for its support, and Fae, as an independent Wikimedia Commons volunteer, who has worked on the uploads over the past few months. We are delighted that 100k images from our extraordinarily diverse collection are now visible through the most consulted information resource on the planet.

Robert Kiley, Acting Head of Wellcome Library.

As a longtime Wikimedia Commons supporter, I contacted Wellcome Images with a proposal to upload the entire collection, which Wellcome Images supplied on a hard disk (the collection took 300 gigabytes). The images have proven highly popular, with nearly 500 fellow Wikimedia Commons volunteers helping to categorize and reuse the images in Wikipedia articles, along with significant interest for related projects with Wiki Project Med and Wikimedia LGBT+. The images were released on the Wellcome Library's website in 2014 with a non-commercial restriction. Following discussion and a workshop with Wikimedia volunteers, they were changed over to a CC-BY license, to ensure that the public can easily reuse the collection for any purpose.

Sample images

• 
  A baby's teething charm, Roman Empire, 1st to 6th century AD.
  From Wellcome Library CC-BY-4.0.
• 
  A corpulent man, his pain from gout shown by a demon burning his foot. Coloured lithograph by George Cruikshank, London, 1818. From Wellcome Library CC-BY-4.0.
• 
  Battle at Ta-ping gate in 1911, Nankin, China. 1920s Colour lithograph by T. Miyano.
  From Wellcome Library CC-BY-4.0.
• 
  Snakes and Ladders (Jnana Bagi), late 18th century, India.
  From Wellcome Library CC-BY-4.0.

The collection can be browsed at Category:Files from Wellcome Images on Wikimedia Commons. The mass upload project page with discussion and on-going live reports can be found at Commons:Batch uploading/Wellcome Images.

-- Ashley Van Haeften (Fæ, twitter: @Faewik)

Summary

The high resolution photographs and scans are used to illustrate a wide range of Wikipedia articles such as disease, art history, cartoons, sexuality and biographies. This mass upload was coordinated by longtime Wikimedian Fae and other community volunteers.

(this summary will be used to feature this story on the Wikimedia Blog's home page. It will appear below the title, next to the lead image.)

Notes

Ideas for social media messages promoting the published post:

Twitter (@wikimedia/@wikipedia):

(Tweet text goes here - max 117 characters)

* The @WellcomeLibrary donates 100,000 medical history images to @WikiCommons !

---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|------/

Facebook/Google+

• The Wellcome Library donates 100,000 medical images to Wikimedia Commons. The high resolution photographs and scans are used on Wikipedia to illustrate a wide range of articles such as disease, art history, cartoons, sexuality and biographies. -->