Wikimedia upload tutorial

First things first

1. Sign up for an account at Wikimedia Commons. If your username is XYZ, your user page will be http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:XYZ.

2. Make a link to your image gallery. Your image gallery will be a subpage of your user page. Go to your user page, and click the Edit tab at the top. Add an in-wiki link to the subpage user:username/gallery. If your username is XYZ, you would add [[user:XYZ/gallery]] to your user page. Click the Save Page button.

3. Create your image gallery. The link to your Gallery will appear red because it has not been created yet. Click on the link to create and edit the page. Add your gallery to the user galleries category by adding [[category:User galleries]]. Click the Save Page button.

Adding images

Now that you have a gallery set up, you'll probably (hopefully) want to upload images for people to use.

1. Make sure that your image is in a usable format. Preferred image formats are .png, .jpeg (for photographs), .svg, and .gif (for animations only). A list of supported image formats can be found here.

2. Give your image a unique filename. An important thing to note is that Wikimedia does not check for repeat filenames, which means if someone tries to upload a file under the same name as yours, your file will be deleted. To avoid this, try to use unique filenames. You can tag images with your username so that other users are less likely to accidentally overwrite them. For example, instead of uploading a .png and naming it "skull", which is a fairly common name, I can call it "XYZ_skull" if my username is XYZ. This also makes it very clear who originally uploaded the file.

3. Upload your images. Use the "Upload file" link in Wikimedia. It is located in the left column in the "participate" box. Make sure to select the correct license and fill in the summary on the upload form.

4. After uploading the images, add them to your gallery page for everyone to see. You can use the following html template for adding a list of images:

<gallery caption="title of image batch" widths="X px" heights="Y px" perrow="Z">

image:image_name.filetype|description

image:image_name2.filetype|[[wiki link]] description

image:XYZ_skull.png|This is a skull I designed for someone

</gallery>

Where X is the desired width (in pixels), Y is the desired height (in pixels), and Z is the desired number of images per row. Note that dimensioning will be applied uniformly, creating a grid of identically sized images.

5. Link to this gallery to show others your work. If your username is XYZ, the URL will be http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:XYZ/gallery.

Easy Uploading Tools

• Commonist, a Java program for uploading batches of images to Wikimedia.
• Magnus' move-to-commons assistant.

"Help! I can't ___!"/FAQ

You can find general help files at the Wikimedia Commons FAQ. Image specific help can be found here.