Loading content onto Wikimedia Commons is not difficult. But you do need to follow a few important steps at the beginning. By doing this, not only will ensure that your work goes into the right place and is easy to find; you’ll also familiarise yourself with the Wikimedia process and style which will make each upload easier.

Step 1 – Create and Account
To create an account, click here.

Before you start uploading material, you need to create an account. Look at the top right-hand corner of the start page at Wikimedia Commons. See where it says “Log in / create account”? That’s where you want to be.

This’ll take you to a login mask. Click the boldface link “Create an account”

You’ll now see the account creation mask.
You’ll have to answer a security question, which is done for spam protection.
Then enter a username and a safe password.
You will be asked for an email address. You don’t have to give one, but if you do provide one, you will be able to exchange emails with other users.
If you decide to enter an email address, you’ll have to confirm it at a later stage. Remember that a confirmed address would be the only chance to get a new password, in case you'd ever forget it.
Your email address will only be shown to those users you choose to send emails to.

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be able to customise the appearance of your interface and your language preferences. Just remember to click the ‘Save’ button to save your customised preferences. If you ever want to go back to the original default settings, all you need to do it click the “Reset” button.


Step 2 – Upload Your File
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Upload_form

Now that you are logged on, you can create and upload files onto Wikimedia Commons.

Get The Legal Stuff Sorted First
On the list of options on the left side of the screen, above the “search” field on top of the “participate” box, you’ll find an “Upload file” link.
Clicking the link will take you to the Commons:Upload page, which contains a very important legal disclaimer.
This is a must-read to briefly learn about the legal requirements files have to adhere to and the license conditions available for your work.
It’s in your best interest to read this thoroughly, as non-complying files will be deleted without further warning.
In short, it is required that files may be reused and modified for any purpose with or without the author’s consent.
If you have any doubts or questions about which license to use, don’t hesitate to ask at Commons talk:Licensing before uploading your files.
Generally, files published under a copyleft license—such as the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License)—are fine, but compliance should always be checked first.

Upload Your File
Below the legal text is the upload form.
To select the file on your computer, click onto the “Browse” button next to the field “Source filename”.
This’ll pop up a file selection dialogue.
Once you’ve selected the file and pressed “Ok” the text field contains its path.

Name Your File Properly
By default, your local filename will be used.
If this is a non-descriptive name—e. g. a name like “DSC123456.jpg” from a digital camera—you can change it using the “Destination filename” field. Cryptic names for images render them a lot harder to find and use. And if you use a default filename from your camera , it's much more likely that someone else will accidentally overwrite your image. So please choose proper filenames for Wikimedia Commons. This is especially important, since you can’t rename a file once it’s been uploaded

Summarise What You Have Uploaded
Further down is a larger “Summary” field.
This is important as well, as an image without a description of its content is just about as useful as no image at all.
You don’t need to get fancy or use complicated language.
Just describe it: what’s the subject? Where and how was it made? By whom? When? If any, which camera did you use?

Please also respect these points:
*If you made the file, just say so.
*If you copied it from another web site, provide a URL.
*If you copied it from another Wikimedia project, indicate which one (for example, "the German Wikipedia"), the author there, and the original title.
*If you are uploading a modified version of a file, it is important to specify in as much detail as possible how you changed the file.
*Sort the image in one specific gallery or category (please no connotation blaster).

Step 3 – Categorise Your Upload
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Sorting

You need to make sure that you have categorised your upload correctly, so that people can find it easily.
Other people need to find your file in order to use it to illustrate articles in other Wikimedia projects.
It is crucial to add your media files to specific categories and/or specific gallery articles on Commons, otherwise your valuable media files won’t get used that much. An example of a gallery page could be the image gallery of the planet Mars. You can tell if a page is an article or a category by looking at its name. Pages without a prefix are article pages, pages with a “Category:” prefix are categories and pages with “Image:” are image pages. This concept with these prefixes is called “namespaces”.
That way you can easily separate different content.

Adding an image to a category is done like adding a Wikipedia article to a category. Simply place something like the following example code at the image page itself:

[[Category:Some specific category]]

Be as specific as possible. Don’t add an image to an overcrowded root category. In order to find a right category for your image, the category tree function will help you a lot: just go to a general category, such as Category:Countries and then follow the subcategories until you find the most specific one that describes your image.

Adding Your Images to Galleries

In order to add an image to a gallery go after upload to the gallery article, click there on “edit” and you will see among other things something like this:


Image:Mars Valles Marineris.jpeg|Valles Marineris on Mars
Image:Mars Hubble.jpg|Mars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, Realistic Colors


You can add your image between those two gallery-tags (one opening and one closing tag) in the following way:

Image:Your photo name.jpg|A brief description

After saving the article you will now see your image as thumbnail in the gallery. Unlike in the normal case when you incorporate a single image into an article you don’t use the [[- and ]]-brackets around the image. For sound and video files it works the same way.

tags: education

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