 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
 | This page is about getting permission to add other people's work into Wikipedia.
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To use copyrighted material on Wikipedia, it is not enough that we have permission to use it on Wikipedia alone. That's because Wikipedia itself states all its material may be used by anyone, for any purpose. So we have to be sure all material is in fact licensed for that purpose, whoever provided it.
To do this, we must often email or contact the copyright holders and ask them to irrevocably release the source material under one or more suitably-free and compatible copyright licenses, so that the content may be used at Wikipedia. We ordinarily ask that such release be provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA) or a CC BY-SA-compatible license and, if possible, also the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). See our copyright policy for more.
The main legal issue that is important to explain to potential contributors: they would be agreeing that their material can be used freely by Wikipedia AND its downstream users, and that such use might include commercial use, for which the contributor is not entitled to royalties or compensation. Wikimedia itself is a non-profit organization, and any money it raised from the re-use of Wikimedia content would go to furthering our aims—buying new servers to keep the websites running efficiently, producing print runs, making Wikipedia available on CD/DVD for schools and developing countries, and other activities. However, not all of those who re-use our content are so high-minded.
This means that a contributor's work might appear in print or digital versions of this encyclopedia that are sold in stores. It might appear in books, or other specialized subsets of the full text—teacher curriculum packets, publicity brochures, or other uses we haven't thought of yet. It will certainly be used by other websites that legally copy our content.
About half the people we ask say yes, especially if it's explained that the license terms mean it is more widely appreciated and that we do not want to use all their material, but just one image or item. See Wikipedia:Example requests for permission for more.
This page explains what must be done if you want to use content that's copyrighted, whether you know who produced it or you don't.