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Community Central

When uploading a file, you should tag it with the appropriate copyright tag, in order to make its copyright status clear.

Remember: all images uploaded to Fandom should be used under fair use or be images that are freely available, with or without conditions or restrictions. You must adhere to any licensing requirements, such as attributing the author and source on the file description page.

Available licensing tags[]

There are eleven standard licensing tags that are provided by default on all newly created communities. These cover both fair and free use images, as well as a few other types of images. They can be seen in Category:Image license templates in the Starter Wiki.

The tags are as follows:

  • {{PD}}: Public domain. For example, when the author has put the work into the public domain or the author died over 70 years ago.
  • {{Fairuse}}: For a copyrighted image which is used in a manner consistent with fair use.
  • {{CC-BY-SA}}: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0
  • {{Permission}}: For when the owner of the image has given full permission for it to be used freely.
  • {{From Wikimedia}}: For images taken from Wikimedia. Remember to add the specific license information too.
  • {{GFDL}}: For items covered by the GNU Free Documentation License
  • {{LGPL}}: For items covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License
  • {{MIT}}: For items covered by the MIT License
  • {{Other free}}: Any free license such as the GNU General Public License or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
  • {{Self}}: For image you made yourself, and release under a free license. Remember, a specific license tag is much better.
  • {{Nolicense}}: This template can be used to mark images where the copyright status is unknown. It adds them to the Unattributed Files category for later maintenance.

If you are an administrator, you can edit the list of copyright tags that appear in the "Licensing" drop down menu by modifying MediaWiki:Licenses.

Using copyright tags[]

When uploading files via Special:Upload, you can select one of these copyright tags in the "Licensing" drop down menu. For example:

ImageTagMenu

If you are uploading through the visual editor or the image placeholder tools, you will need to go to the image description page:

  • Click the image in the article.
  • Click the magnifying glass in the lower right-hand corner.
  • Once one the file description page, click "Edit" at the top and then copy the wikitext code for one of the templates into the edit window.
For example, if you are using the fair use template, add {{Fairuse}}.

Please remember that you are responsible for the upload and use of every image you upload and ensuring that the copyright you have provided is correct.

See also[]

Further help and feedback[]