Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments/Help desk

WLM 2024

Participating countries

Uploaded images

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FAQ

Help desk

For organizers

In September and October, the Wiki Loves Monuments is taking place in about 40 countries. All over the world people cooperate to take photographs of monuments and upload these to Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes new uploaders come across difficulties. If you have any please let us help you. Ask your questions. Please provide us with useful information, such as the country you are trying to participate in or maybe the pictures you have already uploaded. This is a multilingual page, you can write here in English or, if you prefer, in other languages of participating countries. → Ask a new question

 

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Freedom of panorama

Hello, I hope you are all well.

I hope the organizing team can answer this question that has been confusing me a lot. If we review this page, we will find that some countries completely prohibit publishing photos of their public places on Commons (mostly because of the type of license). This means that if I publish photos of monuments in my country Morocco on Wikimedia Commons, I will have committed a violation. Is this true ? (Note: The administrators have previously deleted photos I published for the same reason)

Thank you all Mounir Neddi (talk) 15:21, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mounir Neddi,

Limited Freedom of Panorama is indeed a problem in many countries. Every country participating in WLM has a work around though, and in the case of Morocco the images that are eligible for WLM (and also, a good rule of thumb for images of building in Morocco in general) is the exemption for buildings who's exteriors have gone into the public domain because of their age. So, no to the new Hassan 2 mosque from Casablanca (as I myself had to learn the hard way a few years back!), and yes to cities like Aït Ben Haddou. The national team of WLM Morocco will have more details for you, so pinging @Abdeaitali & Rachidourkia for attention. Ciell (talk) 16:35, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Ciell

Thank you for your detailed response.

Regarding the possibility of uploading pictures of old buildings, it is not correct according to Moroccan law. (Law No. 2-00 on Copyright and Related Rights (promulgated by Dahir No. 1-00-20 of 9 Kaada 1420 (February 15, 2000), and amended by Law No. 34‐05)

Article 25 of this law states that old buildings are exempted from economic rights only, not moral rights.

Article 20 of the same law explains what is meant by moral rights, it is: CC BY-ND

We all know that Wikimedia Commons does not accept the (CC BY-ND) license. That's why Morocco is shown in red on the map (Not Ok, No exceptions).

To upload any image of public places in Morocco to Wikimedia Commons, the only way is to upload it with a fake license (CC BY or CC0 or CC BY-SA), what is considered a violation of copyright.

Best regards Mounir Neddi (talk) 18:31, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mounir Neddi,

Moral rights are a non-copyright restriction, so a kind of right that is different from copyright. Moral rights can exist alongside Public Domain and Commons considers non-copyright restrictions to be matters for photographers/uploaders or reusers, and therefore they are not grounds for deletion of works from Commons. See Commons:Non-copyright restrictions to learn more. Ciell (talk) 19:17, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you @Ciell for the clarification, it is not that easy, read again and you will find many exceptions.

However, I think that participants should at least be reminded of these rules so that further violations do not occur. Mounir Neddi (talk) 20:26, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Mounir Neddi still, at least one erring image slipped through. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contributions) 03:03, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Ukraine

I would suggest organizers of the Ukrainian WLM-2024 competition to add rules concerning restrictive FoP rights of the country. Ukrainian law does not permit images of monuments that have economic significance, so non-commercial only (but it is against COM:Licensing to disallow commercial Creative Commons licenses). The problem is that multiple monuments with designated numbers (likely part of the cultural heritage designation of Ukraine) are copyrighted. Examples: Category:Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Irpin (DR) and Category:Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Orativ (DR). If the Ukrainian authorities still do not want commercial uses of their monuments, then it is strongly suggested to add relevant rules in the Ukrainian competition, so that only old Ukrainian monuments (either from pre-1930s or those whose sculptors have died for more than 70 years) are permitted to be hosted here. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 08:48, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

@JWilz12345: We do have rules regarding FoP, they exist for a few years already, see uk:Вікіпедія:Вікі любить пам'ятки/Свобода панорами. The freedom of panorama is also mentioned on the new contest home page: uk:Вікіпедія:Вікі любить пам'ятки#copyright.

However, the situation is not black and white, so we can't just say don't upload pictures of all post 1930s monuments. Sometimes monuments are not copyrightable, for instance, File:Radekhiv Liubomlskyi Volynska-monument in honor of the first truckers who worked in the fields of Volyn-general view-1.jpg was built in 1966 but doesn't contain anything copyrightable. Some are mass produced, and for those we need to track the earliest copy installed, for instance, Commons:Deletion requests/File:Bratski mogyly teremno.JPG. Sometimes it is possible to picture a part of the monument which is not copyrighted, for instance, despite this DR File:Літописне місто Переяслав IMG 1161.jpg is still useful for Commons. And sometimes we manage to get a permission, for instance, we got a VRT permission for Category:Music and Drama Theater, Rivne and files were undeleted.

In addition, there is often no way of finding out if the monument is copyrighted without doing extensive research, sometimes even without travelling there (which is not really feasible for 100K+ monuments). The official government database is pretty useless: for example, here is structured data for one of Taras Shevchenko monuments. The government data says it was built in 1814 and 1861, but these are his years of birth and death; and this database does not even have a field to indicate an author (these same Ukrainian authorities who protect copyright have chosen 60 fields to describe a monument, but none of them identifies authorship). We have sometimes crowdsourced more data from other sources, and in these cases we try flag this in the lists (such as uk:Вікіпедія:Вікі любить пам'ятки/Польська спадщина/Львівська область).

The solution is probably a mix of informing participants (which we do), trying to get more information about monuments and eventually permissions for them (which is a work in progress), and working to move some of the FoP-affected images locally to Ukrainian Wikipedia under EDP (which worked before but doesn't really happen now, happy to discuss further). On behalf of WLM Ukraine team — NickK (talk) 21:22, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

@NickK thanks for the response. As it is confirmed that your WLM landing pages have rules already, perhaps the sole responsibility lies with the photographers themselves (the uploaders). Nevertheless, it is implied here that there is a renewed attempt to liberalize FoP in Ukraine, but it just happened that political events in the country and the eventual Russo-Ukrainian war hindered such move. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 22:42, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

@JWilz12345: Yes, Wikimedia Ukraine mentioned there is also the organiser of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine. We are indeed discussing this, but it is unfortunately not the highest priority during the war — NickK (talk) 22:55, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Need help fixing categories and templates for a few 100 images for WLM Palestine ASAP

Hi all, can I ask for help with something? My friend in West Bank has uploaded 100s of photos for Wiki Loves Monuments Palestine, but he's never done anything with Wikimedia before and he's uploading from his phone with a poor connection so they've uploaded without the proper categories and templates. Does anyone know what the proper categories and templates are and how to check if they've been added and if not how to add them? I really don't want him to have put so much effort in and then them aren't counted :( If anyone could explain how to do it, or even better can fix it in a few click I'd really really appreciate it.

• Here is the list of files, everything he has uploaded is for WLM https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=500&user=RaedHajj&ilshowall=1

Thanks very much

John Cummings (talk) 09:18, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Basically, all the files uploaded between 1st Sept and 30 Sept, that have the WLM 2024 template join in the competition, so from a random small sample I would say their images are eligible (but ping for @Romaine to double check). What would be essential to use these images in the Wikimedia projects is the mention of what monument is depicted: he mentions the names, which is already helpful, but what would be even better is to have a monument-id.

Most of the time that is why we advise national teams to steer their participants through an upload pipeline that includes monument lists on Wikipedia, or interactive maps: both can automatically add the right categories and templates connected to these monuments during the upload process. Ciell (talk) 07:13, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ciell, thanks so much for your reply, really helpful :) John Cummings (talk) 11:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

So many pictures upload early

Can someone explain why there are so many photos included in the contest that are upload prior to October 2024 and especially so many not even taken in 2024?

Skarz (talk) 23:14, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Skarz, some countries had their Wiki Loves Monuments competition during the month of September. For other countries, like US, the competition period is October. As for the second part of your question: it is allowed that the pictures were taken before 2024. As long as the upload takes place in the competition period. I hope this answers both your questions. HenkvD (talk) 17:53, 6 October 2024 (UTC)