HblairH

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Hello, HblairH! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! XXX8906 (talk) 23:19, 20 March 2016 (UTC) Getting Started Contributing to Wikipedia The five pillars of Wikipedia • Tutorial • Your first article How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting Help Frequently Asked Questions New contributors' help page Where to: ask questions • make requests Tip of the day Request administrator attention Policies and Guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Simplified Manual of Style • Three-revert rule Copyrights • Non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism • Sock puppetry Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The Community Community Portal • Adopt-a-user program Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • Resolving disputes Build consensus • Village pump IRC channels • Mailing lists Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community (The Signpost) Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Maintenance • Peer review • Requested articles Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

Help request

I am attempting to place a scan of the autograph of General George Foster Shepley on his page and keep getting the error

"{| style="width:100%; padding:1px 4px; border:1px solid #bb7070; background:#ffdbdb;" | style="text-align:center; width:60px;" | | An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. If this edit is constructive, please report this error. |}"

any help would be appreciated.

HblairH (talk) 22:16, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Is the scan uploaded on Commons? If not, then that may be why. Woodstop45 • Talk ^(Contribs) 23:17, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

If you are trying to upload a scan to commons and are getting that error it might be due to a current glitch that there is a phab ticket in for. You should be able to continue to upload even after that error. --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 04:07, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm going to refer you to IRC I think we'd be better able to help you there. See the updated "help me" template above. --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 05:07, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I'd in general advise you to make use of the Wikimedia Commons' Upload Wizard. The cross-wiki upload process you have been using is meant only for self-created images, such as photos you personally took. Those signatures and documents you upload are decidedly not your own work; you do not own the copyright (since they're in the public domain anyway). The upload process you have been using mis-tags all those images. That will need to be fixed. Compare for example File:Seal-&-signature.jpg marked as "own work". Huon (talk) 21:43, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I would have to disagree and have dealt with this before. My Daughter-in-law is an attorney and as she explained it to me. I TOOK the photos that makes them my work whether I used a scanner or a camera so long as I have permission to take the photos or take photos of items in the public domain wich I own myself or did own at the time the photos were taken. Using your logic if I took a photo of a statue I could not say the photo was my own work because I didn't carve the statue which is just not the law. Thank you everyone for your help. I uploaded to commons first and had no issues. I just needed to know which way to do it. HblairH (talk) 02:56, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". I'd say by extension this also holds for faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain writings. Compare commons:Template:PD-Art for an explanation of the Wikimedia Foundation's stance. (The statue in your example, however, is not two-dimensional.) If you used a scanner instead of a camera, it's even more obvious that you are creating a copy yourself and cannot establish a new copyright. Anyway, that does not resolve the issue of whether those writings are free from the original authors' copyright. I strongly assume they are, but technically it's entirely possible under US law for something written in the early 19th century to still be copyrighted by the original author (respectively his heirs). Huon (talk) 22:00, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Because an organization such as this has adopted that as their policy doesn't make it enforceable under the law. Go to any museum website and start using their photos of their art or documents or photographs they have in their collection on a commercial website and see how long it takes them to enforce their intellectual rights to those items. For the record I use a camera to produce the images I make of items in my collection. I am a published photographer. You can find my photos on almost every aquarium website especially those pertaining to African Cichlids and I have had to enforce my intellectual rights before. I have contributed photos here because I believe the signatures of these "lesser known" historical figures provide a tangible and very personal link to those individuals and through that individual, a link to the time in which they lived. If it is too much to ask that photographs of documents be credited to me then perhaps I need to rethink making further contributions to wikipedia HblairH (talk) 18:01, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

There are three separate copyright issues here: Firstly, I don't think photographing a document gives you any more of a copyright claim than reproducing it via a photocopier or a scanner or some other means. That might be debatable. Secondly, for the more elaborate documents you'd need to establish that the original author (or his heirs) no longer has a valid copyright claim. That's very unlikely, but not impossible under US law (to my understanding, not even if the author has been dead for centuries). Thirdly, the simpler signatures likely are in the public domain because they don't meet the threshold of originality. I have raised the issue at Wikipedia:Media copyright questions#Photographs of documents for more input by editors experienced in copyright questions.

To avoid a misunderstanding: I greatly appreciate your contributions to Wikipedia and to the Wikimedia Commons, and I'm not raising these issues because I want to rob you of your credits; getting copyright right is important, though. Huon (talk) 22:55, 6 September 2016 (UTC)