Wikipedia talk:Canada Education Program/Courses/Present

UofT Logo

Greetings Hammersoft,

You removed the University of Toronto's logo from the Canada Education Program's site today, citing WP:NFCC and noting that "fair use" images are not allowed to be used in the main space. All that I did was link to the image on the UofT page. Why is the image allowed in the university's article and not on our page? Jaobar (talk) 05:29, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

See item 9, restrictions on location, in the NFCC: "Non-free content is allowed only in articles (not disambiguation pages), and only in article namespace…"^{[emphasis added]} This page is in the Wikipedia: namespace, not the main (article) namespace. That's why non-free images may not be used on it. Unfortunately, I don't think identification of the institution is a sufficient reason to grant an exemption; the text list works just fine (or better, thanks to searching and sortability of tables) in that regard. —C.Fred (talk) 05:43, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Why were the images on this page from the USPPI allowed then? Was it because they aren't logos? Jaobar (talk) 05:51, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Partially. More importantly, they're free. The non-free content restrictions are designed to make sure that as much of Wikipedia is free as possible. That's why there are pretty harsh restrictions on where non-free content can be used. A university logo may be used in the article about the university because it's an identifying mark of the subject of the article; additionally, the origin or symbolism of the logo may be discussed in the article. Similarly, the logo of a school's athletics program may be used in the main article about the program but not in articles about events the teams have participated in: it's identification and permissible use to have the Bisons logo in the Manitoba Bisons article, but it would be adornment and impermissible to use the logo in the 43rd Vanier Cup article.

So, back to the USPPI page, the photographs used there are all free. This photo, used for Boston University, was taken by a Wikipedia editor; he licensed the photograph under Creative Commons and GFDL licenses that allow copying and distribution of the photo (including commercial re-use). That makes the photo free content, and free content can be used just about anywhere on Wikipedia. —C.Fred (talk) 06:13, 3 August 2011 (UTC)