Wikipedia upload manager for photos of the rich and famous

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Contributing text to Wikipedia is as easy as clicking on the “Edit this page” link at the top of an entry. But contributing photos is harder. To write text about Leeuwarden, you don’t have to be there, but to take a photo of Leeuwarden you do. The quality of a text is only limited by your own skills, but that of a photo also by the quality of your equipment. And finally, your text is your own, but who owns a photo is also dependent on what’s in the picture.

It’s no wonder then that there is a shortage of good imagery at Wikipedia. While working on setting up a local version of the Wikipedia photo scavenger hunt which aims to remedy this, I stumbled on a similar project that tries to get portraits of the notable into Wikipedia, Wikipotrait.

The Dutch initiative, hosted at wikiportret.nl, also has an English language counterpart at wikiportrait.org, and is basically a wizard for uploading photos and sorting out the rights situation. The resulting photos will be hosted at Wikimedia Commons under a permissive license. Wikipotret is an initiative of the Werkgroep Vrije Media (Dutch, Working Group Free Media). The site’s been live for a few months now, but was officially announced on May 5.

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