Those thieving image farms
Photos in Wikipedia influence the way people look at the text, because readers can't escape from an image. That's good, as long as photographs in articles give a clear impression of the subject. (I didn't say "neutral", did I?). Wikimedia Commons has an enormous database of photographs, videos, vector images and sounds. This database now consists of 83 million "freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute". That's nice. It's also a database that anyone can steal images from. Roughly 40 million images in Commons are under a Creative Commons CC-BY license – these images require attribution. The other 40 million images have a public domain license, and are up for grabs. In this piece I will show how things work out, and I will give advice on how to prevent stealing of your images.