Dianelanglume

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Dianelanglume!

First steps tutorial Our first steps tour and our frequently asked questions will help you a lot after registration. They explain how to customize the interface (for example the language), how to upload files and our basic licensing policy (Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content). You don't need technical skills in order to contribute here. Be bold when contributing and assume good faith when interacting with others. This is a wiki. Getting help More information is available at the community portal. You may ask questions at the help desk, village pump or on IRC channel #wikimedia-commons (webchat). You can also contact an administrator on their talk page. If you have a specific copyright question, ask at the copyright village pump.

Goodies, tips, and tricks Put Babel boxes on your user page so others know what languages you can speak and indicate your graphic abilities. You can find the files you have uploaded in your Uploads. Please sign your name on Talk pages by typing ~~~~. To link to an image page without embedding the image, type: [[:File:Foo.jpg]], which produces: File:Foo.jpg. You may enable gadgets (custom features) for your account. There are several tools to upload files. Have you edited Wikipedia before? This guide might be useful. Made a mistake? Do you want to have a file renamed or moved? Use the move link and wait for an authorized user to rename it. Do you want to have your recently uploaded picture removed? Tag it as {{speedy|reason here}}. For more information read the deletion guidelines.

-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 19:30, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Category: Photograph by user

Hi, Dianelanglume, thanks for the message on my talk page. Welcome to Commons!

I'm afraid that things can seem a bit complex at the start, but not to worry you'll soon get the hang of it.

The image you've uploaded seems to be a scan or photo of Joseph Langlumé's signature, and I see it's already in use on the French Wikipedia. That's great. There is a slight problem with the author field, though. You've said that the source is "own work", but since you didn't create the signature yourself, this field should give details of the place you found it, for example the name of the book, with publication details and publication date if possible. The date field should list the date of the signature if you know it.

Next, for the same reason, the author should be listed as "Joseph Langlumé", not yourself. Normally, where you upload a photograph, the name of the photographer does indeed go here, but where the photo or scan is just a faithful reproduction of someone else's work (signature, painting etc) you should use the name of the original creator.

Since faithful-copy scans or photos such as yours don't create any new copyright for the photographer, they can't be licensed in the normal way. So, instead of "{{self|cc-by-sa-4.0}}" you should be using "{{PD-old}}" to indicate that the signature is old enough to be entirely out of copyright.

I've made the required changes to the image page for you, but I'll have to leave it to you to change the Source and Date fields.

You've asked about creating a user category to hold your own photographs. I can certainly help with that if need be, but such categories are normally intended for photographers who take 'standard' photographs (of views, people etc) that are entitled to copyright protection. Your image I'm afraid does not qualify for that, and to add a public domain image to a "Photographs by ..." category would give a very confusing message. Do please ask again once you have some 'standard' photos uploaded, and I'll see what we can do. In the meantime, if you want an easy way to see all of your uploaded images, you can simply click on the 'Uploads' link at the top right of your screen when you are logged in to Wikimedia Commons.

You may find Commons:Licensing useful to read. Also, feel free to ask general questions about how to do things at the Help desk.

I hope that's helpful. Do please let me know if anything is unclear. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:35, 5 January 2016 (UTC)