Publishing on Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media archive consisting of images, videos, audio clips, and other media files which promote knowledge and education and which can be used, processed, and disseminated for any purpose. Approved content for Wikimedia Commons is thus limited by the fact that a 3D model must have the potential to be used for educational purposes. Wikimedia’s wording requires files to be “realistically useful for an educational purpose”.

The file format can also be limited. Currently, only 3D models in the .STL format can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This format does not support textures. This means that models where a photorealistic surface is important to understanding or experiencing the object are not suitable for publishing in this format.

If a 3D object already exists as a .STL file, you can follow this guide for uploading it to Wikimedia Commons.

Is the model useful for Wikimedia Commons?

To decide if your model is useful for Wikimedia Commons, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the model meet the requirements of being useful for an existing Wikimedia project, or otherwise educational?

• Is the object sufficiently unique and useful for educational purposes, with sufficient associated information, to become the subject of its own Wikipedia article.

• Are there existing articles on Wikipedia which the object can illustrate? Also check other languages than Swedish, primarily English.

Create a Wikipedia article

The 3D models published on Wikimedia Commons should either be accompanied by their own article or illustrate an existing Wikimedia article.
Use Wikipedia’s search function to check existing related materials in Swedish and English. This will give you a picture of how well-established the subject is on Wikipedia and helps with the upcoming work on linking the article to related articles.

Writing articles for Wikimedia – some general advice:

• Do not add copyrighted material without permission! You can upload your own material under a free license or use media from the Wikimedia Commons free library.

• When adding to an existing article, check first if there is a more specialised article where the supplementary information is more relevant.

• Make searches within the subject in question on Google and other search engines. Maybe you can find more information there?

• Keep in mind that even if works submitted by others can be used as sources of information, all contributions to Wikipedia must be written by yourself. Copy-pasting text written by others is not allowed.
• If you are creating a brand new article, try to find suitable articles which can link to the new page.

• Divide the article into subheadings if it ends up being very long.
• Do not forget to cite your sources.

• introduce yourself, your knowledge and your experience on your user page. This often lends more credibility to your articles and edits.

“Please note that by contributing to Wikipedia, you consent to your text being released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. This means that you consent to your text being freely edited or copied. You also confirm that the contribution dues not violate copyright and that all information in your contribution is verifiable”. (Source: Wikipedia)

See also Wikipedia’s own website for more information about writing, publishing, and editing articles on Wikipedia.

Be an active user

To get the most out of Wikipedia, it is important to see yourself as part of a community, and to be active in this community by:
• Editing articles within relevant areas
• Participate in discussions on principles (without an agenda of your own)
• Helping other Wikipedians who lack expertise in a given subject by, for example, providing good, reliable sources
• Show an interest in and support Wikipedia.

Handling false facts

“We have created a Wikipedia article about an object in our collection, and someone else is now adding false information to it. What can we do?”

You can remove non-sources claims, or claims where the source is of poor quality. If the problem of false, unsourced or poorly sourced facts returns, make a note of it on the discussion page and explain why the claim should be removed. If it takes time for an experienced Wikipedian to turn up and assist you, you can contact Wikipedia in one of the ways listed on the page Contact Wikipedia.

As an active Wikipedia users with many collaborators, you normally get help “cleaning up” bad edits quickly.