Help:File copyright tags

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Many copyrighted images and uploaded files have appeared on Wikia, and not all are available under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Wikians want to know, under what terms can I use, copy, or modify each uploaded file? To give the answer, some Wikia have templates called image copyright tags; you can include one on each image page to indicate the free license, public domain, or fair use status of an image.

In addition to using an image copyright tag, try to include details about the file, such as:
 * where you obtained it (including an Internet link if possible), and
 * who made it.

If you made the file yourself, say so. If the license requires attribution (as the GFDL, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA do), then an image copyright tag alone is not sufficient; you must also state who made the file.

How to use an image copyright tag
The image copyright tag only works if someone has set it up on your Wikia.

To use an image copyright tag:
 * when uploading a file, include one (for example,  ) in the image description, or,
 * if the wiki has one, pick a license from the license selector menu on the Special:Upload page.

If you need to add an image copyright tag after the image was uploaded, visit the image's description page, edit the page, and add the template tag.

Tags on the Central Wikia
Images here on the Central Wikia can use any of these tags:


 * Public domain
 * PD - public domain - Public domain means that there is no copyright. If using this tag, please specify why the file is public domain. Did the copyright expire? Did the author dedicate the work to the public domain? Was the file far too trivial to copyright?
 * Generic free licenses
 * CopyrightedFreeUse - Some copyright holders retain the copyright (so the file is not public domain) but give you permission to do anything.
 * Attribution - This is like CopyrightedFreeUse, except the copyright holder also requires that you give them credit.
 * - For example,
 * Particular free licenses
 * GFDL - GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2 or later - Same as the wiki.
 * GPL - GNU General Public License, version 2 or later
 * FAL - Free Art License
 * cc-by-sa - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
 * cc-by - Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
 * Fair use
 * Fairuse - The image or file is copyrighted, but you claim "fair use".
 * Logo - For copyrighted and trademarked logos, when exhibiting them on a page that describes the thing which owns the logo. For example, Central Wikia's Freenode page uses this for Image:Freenode.png.

Unacceptable licenses
Do not upload images or files under these licenses, and do not create tags for them (unless the tag is to mark the image for deletion). These copyrights are not free enough to use on Wikia:
 * Unknown copyrights
 * Noncommercial licenses, including any Creative Commons -NC licenses
 * Nonderivitative licenses, including any Creative Commons -ND licenses, and any GFDL'd works that have declared Invariant Sections or Cover Texts

(Sister projects of Wikia might allow some of the above.)

How to set up image copyright tags
The easiest way to set up image copyright tags on your Wikia is to copy and adapt the tags from another Wikia or another MediaWiki installation, especially Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. You are only creating or editing templates, so you do not need administrator access to the wiki.

It is easier to copy and share files between multiple MediaWiki communities if the equivalent tags have the same names. Here are places to find tags:
 * Tags here on Central Wikia
 * Commons:Copyright tags has a huge collection of international public domain tags and popular free license tags.
 * Wikipedia:Image copyright tags has some public domain and free license tags, and also some interesting fair use tags that you might want to copy. Notice how many tags on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are equivalent.

When creating or adapting tags, consider:
 * Which tags do you want?
 * If you plan to claim fair use on several promotional posters or computer software screenshots, maybe you want to investigate Wikipedia's fair use tags. If you plan to copy many images from Wikimedia Commons, you might want to copy their tags.
 * The NetHack Wikia has screenshots of the free and open source computer game, thus they have Template:NGPL for the NetHack General Public License.
 * WikiFur has all of Template:cover, Template:comic-panel, Template:logo, Template:fursona, Template:screenshot, Template:press. You might choose to not have a generic Fairuse tag.
 * Each tag should put the image into a category. What are the categories that you want to use? Template:GFDL here on Central Wikia uses Category:GFDL images (plural). Some other wiki use Category:GFDL image (singular) or Category:GFDL (as on Wikimedia Commons). You can use one category per template, or you might have some templates share a category, for example you might have several public-domain tags which all use the same Category:Public domain images.
 * How do you want to style your tags? For example, w:c:NetHack:Template:GFDL is a reddish-gold box.
 * You might want to only copy the tag text, not the Wikimarkup or HTML, from another wiki. Some of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons tags contain extraneous  and   HTML attributes that are meaningless on your wiki, unless you are using them in your MediaWiki:Common.css.

How to create each copyright tag
Step 1: create a Template:Foo tag on your wiki, with something like:

 Permission is granted to use this file under the terms of the Foo License. This adds page to .

Which makes:

 Permission is granted to use this file under the terms of the Foo License.

You might want to adapt it (if you know HTML or CSS, or to add decorative images) or copy code from another wiki.

Step 2: create Category:Foo (or Category:Foo images, or whatever you called it) and write a category description. You might also categorise the category (maybe you have a Category:Image copyright statuses to put all the categories in).

Step 3: to mark an image with this tag, just write   in its image description.

Creating a license menu on Special:Upload
It is likely that users will want to upload images or files even though they do not know the details about the copyright templates on your wiki. Thus, to make it easy, an administrator on your wiki should set up a license selector, a new feature in MediaWiki 1.6.

See Help:License selector.