Dear Mr./Mrs. xxxxx:
I am one of the many volunteer editors of the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), the free, not-for-profit encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is among the most-visited sites on the Internet, ranking in the top ten both worldwide and in the United States. An article was recently created about you, http://en.wikipedia.orgview_html.php?sq=&lang=&q=article_title, and is already the second link that comes up in a Google search of you using <"article title">. Because Wikipedia cannot use copyrighted images except in very limited circumstances, many of our photographs are submitted by our users, who take them informally somewhere (thus owning the copyright) and then release them either into the public domain or under another free license. The image in the article now is of that type and I think not of the best quality. This is not uncommon since Wikipedia's contributors are not normally professional photographers, and the photograph was not taken under controlled conditions.
For that reason, I am writing to ask if you have a better photograph than the one currently in the article, that you will release to the Wikimedia Foundation, so that we can replace the present image with one of higher quality and one that you would prefer over it. The rub of course is that we can only use an image you provide if you release it from copyright. Except for very limited circumstances, all of our images must be under a free license that irrevocably permits anyone else to use the image, modify it, or even sell it, with the only permissible requirements being that the author is named, and that any modification of the image be released under an identical license to the one the image is licensed under by you upon your release.
Example licenses that would permit us to use a better-quality image would be: the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode) or release into the public domain. You are under absolutely no obligation to release any material under such licenses, but I thought that for public-relations purposes, you might want to consider it given Wikipedia's vast reach.
If you do wish to release such a photograph, the procedure is as follows:
Email the photo to [email protected]
In that email, you must explicitly state:
1. That you own the copyright on the photo—you photographed it yourself, it is a work for hire (i.e. a photograph you hired someone to take of you) or, more rarely, the copyright was transferred to you via written statement or operation of law (e.g., inheritance). Please specify which scenario applies.
2. What copyright license you want to release it under. Whatever license you choose must allow the photo to be freely copied and modified by anyone (including third parties not affiliated with Wikipedia), for any purpose.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
NAME