ArmchairGM Wiki:Image use policy

This page is a brief overview of the policies towards images &mdash; including format, content, and copyright issues &mdash; on ArmchairGM.

You can go directly to Special:Upload to upload an image.

Rules of thumb

 * 1)  Keep copyrights in mind when uploading images. When in doubt, do not upload copyrighted images.
 * 2) Always provide a detailed source for where the image came from, either a URL if it is from the web, or a name (or alias) and method of contact (i.e. Talk page, email, etc.) for the photographer.
 * 3)  Use the image description page to describe an image and its copyright situation.
 * 4)  Use a clear, detailed title. Note that if any image with the same title has already been uploaded, it will be replaced with your new one.
 * 5) Edit the images to show just the relevant subject.
 * 6) Don't put photo credits in articles or on the images themselves; put them on the description page.

Copyright (images)
Please note: this is not the official copyright policy &mdash; it is merely a reminder with helpful tips:

Before you upload an image, make sure that either:
 * You own the rights to the image (usually meaning that you created the image yourself).
 * You can prove that the copyright holder has licensed the image under a free license.
 * You can prove that the image is in the public domain.
 * You believe, and state, a fair use rationale for the specific use of the image that you intend.

Always note the image's copyright status on the image description page, and provide specific details about the image's origin. If you created the image, for example, write image created by John Doe on Jan 1st, 2000 (replacing John Doe with your name, and Jan 1st, 2000 with the image creation date). Don't just write image created by me.

User-created images
ArmchairGM highly encourages users to upload their own images and release them under a free license (such as the GFDL). Such images can include photographs which you yourself took (remember that rights to images generally lie with the photographer, not the subject), drawings or diagrams you yourself created, and other self-created work. However simply re-tracing a copyrighted image or diagram does not necessarily create a new copyright &mdash; copyright is generated only by instances of "creativity", and not by the amount of labor which went into the creation of the work. Photographs of three-dimensional objects almost always generate a new copyright &mdash; photographs of two-dimensional objects often do not (see the section on "public domain" below). If you have questions in respect to this, please ask them at ArmchairGM:Copyrights.

Editing images
Use the Upload file page to replace an image with an edited version. Make sure your file has the same name as the one being replaced.

Converting an image to another file format changes the filename, hence the new image will have an entirely separate image description page.

Deleting images

 * 1) Contact (through their talk page) the  user who uploaded the image, telling them of your concerns. You may be able to resolve the issue at this point.
 * 2) Remove all uses of the image from articles &mdash; make it an orphan.
 * 3) Add a copyright infrignment notice to the image description page
 * 4) List the image on ArmchairGM:Copyright problems

To actually delete an image after following the above procedure, you must be an administrator. To do so, go to the image description page and click the (del) or Delete this page links. Deleted images cannot be undeleted. Therefore they are gone permanently unless someone happened to keep a backup.

Format

 * Drawings, icons, political maps, flags and other such images are preferably uploaded in SVG format as vector images. For images with large, simple, and continuous blocks of color which are not available as SVG should be in PNG format.
 * Photos and photo-like maps should be in JPEG format.
 * Inline animations should be in animated GIF format.
 * Video should be in Ogg/Theora format.

In general, if you have a good image that is in the wrong format, convert it to the correct format before uploading. However, if you find a map, flag, etc in JPEG format, only convert it to PNG if this reduces the file size without causing artifacts.

Try to avoid editing JPEGs too frequently--each edit creates more loss of quality. If you can find an original of a photograph in 16-bit or 24-bit PNG or TIFF, edit that, and save as JPEG before you upload.

Avoid images that mix photographic and iconic content. Though CSS makes it easy to use a PNG overlay on top of a JPEG image, the Wikilaw software does not allow such a technique. Thus, both parts must be in the same file, and either the quality of one part will suffer, or the file size will be unnecessarily large.

Uploaded image size
Uploaded files must be smaller than 16 megabytes. The MediaWiki software Wikilaw uses can resize images automatically as of version 1.3, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself. Please help ArmchairGM content be reused widely&mdash;including as a source for printed media&mdash;by uploading photographic images at high resolution. Use the ArmchairGM image markup to resize it.

For line art, particularly that which you've drawn yourself, it may be better to manually resize the images to the right size and use them in the article. This is because the automatic resizing function can sometimes produce images that are larger in bytes than the original and/or of worse quality than the original.

In the future, Mediawiki image markup may be extended to better support "manual thumbnailing"; for now, go ahead and upload a large version of a manually-scaled image and then link to the larger version in the original's image description page.

Displayed image size
In articles, if you wish to have a photo beside the text, you should generally use the "thumbnail" option available in the "Image markup", or approximately 200-250 pixels of width if you're doing it manually. Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors.

Since mediawiki dynamically scales inline images there is no need to reduce file size via scaling or quality reduction when you upload images although compression of PNGs is useful. Faster page loading can be facilitated by using smaller sizes via the image tags.

Inline animations should be used sparingly; a static image with a link to the animation is preferred unless the animation has a very small file size. Keep in mind the problems with print compatibility mentioned above.

Image queuing
Articles may get ugly and difficult to read if there are too many images crammed onto a page with relatively little text. They may even overlap.

For this reason, it is often a good idea to temporarily remove the least-important image from an article and queue it up on the article's talk page. Once there is enough text to support the image, any contributor is free to shift the image back into the article.

If a contributor believes such a queued image to be essential to the article, despite the lack of text, he or she may decide to put it back in. However, he or she should not simply revert the article to its previous state, but make an attempt to re-size the images or create some sort of gallery section in order to deal with the original problem.

It is a good idea to use the tag for queued images.

It is important that queued images not be lost when archiving of talk pages takes place.

Revision history of articles containing images
Old versions of articles do not show corresponding old versions of images, but the latest ones, unless the file names of the images have changed.