DPLA is engaged in a fantastic project to integrate records harvested by DPLA and upload those rights-free materials to Wikimedia Commons so that they might be exposed to a wider audience that they might otherwise receive. For more detailed information on this project as a whole there is a recording of a conference presentation given on that topic at the ODNFest 2020 that can be useful. This post however is to provide information on the nitty-gritty of what buttons one has to click in order to get an image in your local image repository into a Wikipedia article (with lots and lots of screenshots).
This post assumes that your organization and DPLA Content or Service Hub has already gone through the work of ingesting your content into Wikimedia Commons. This outlines the nitty-gritty of what to do next.
If you are doing this work as someone responsible for a repository that is contributing to DPLA, there is a good chance actually searching for images inside your repository is the easiest way for you to go about the work since you are more familiar with how records are structured and organized in that environment. So say you find a photograph in a digitized local history book and think it’s a good candidate for inclusion in a Wikipedia article.
Finding the Image in Wikimedia Commons
For instance a picture of an explosive powder company in Toledo. First you need to find the image in Wikimedia Commons. Search the title of the book in Wikimedia Commons to find all the images associated with it. Since the ingest process from your local repository to Wikimedia Commons breaks complex digital objects (such as books) into many single simple digital objects, in this case we’ll get a number of results.
The ingest process into Wikimedia Commons creates wonderfully consistent file names which are reflected in the page URL. I’ve found the easiest way to find the specific page needed is to simply open any of the pages associated with the book being searched for in the Wikimedia Commons results page and alter the URL to get the page needed. In the first screenshot above we see that the page with our explosives company on it is page 37 in the CONTENTdm record, and the first entry in the Wikimedia Commons results is the same book but page 53.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Year_book_-_photo_flashes_showing_Toledo%27s_phenomenal_progress,_thriving_industries_and_wonderful_resources_-_DPLA_-_ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94_(page_53).jpgSimply adjust the last portion of that URL from “(page_53).jpg” to “(page_37).jpg” will bring up the desired page quickly and easily without sorting through Wikimedia Common’s results page (there also may be a simpler way to do this using advanced search in Wikimedia Commons but this is easy enough that I haven’t bothered investigating).
If searching for the item by title brings up a long list of irrelevant search results in Wikimedia Commons, there is an alternate solution for that problem.
Editing Images for Articles
But we don’t want to insert this entire book page into an article, just the image on it. So we’ll need a utility that can be enabled in Wikimedia Commons called the Crop Tool. Once you are registered with a Wikimedia account (which is shared across Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, and other sites) click on “Preferences” in the top right corner of the screen, and then “Gadgets” in the tabbed menus in the center of the screen.
In the “Interface: Editing and uploads” section, select the checkbox for “Crop Tool.”
Now returning to our Wikimedia Commons record, we’ll see that “Crop Tool” shows up in the list of Tools on the left column of the screen. Click on your newly enabled tool to create a derivative image from the full page that was originally uploaded.
This then bring up a simple image editing tool that allows for crop and rotation of images. Simply drag the box around the portion of the image you want to crop into and hit preview. If you would like to rotate the image enter in a number of degrees into the relevant area which will rotate the image clockwise. Negative values are supported as well.
The preview page allows you to review your work and edit the file name if necessary. The cropped image has an identical file name to the original with the addition of a new final element concatenated to the end: “(cropped).” In this case we can see a red-warning message letting us know that the file-name is not unique in Wikimedia Commons (this is an already completed example.)
However say you have a book or composite photograph from which you want to crop multiple images; simply add a sequence number to the end of the file name in order complete the process.
Finally always ensure the radio button for “Upload as new file” is selected; we never want to overwrite previously existing objects in Wikimedia Commons. Now we see our newly cropped image, ready to be inserted into a Wikipedia article
The file name at the the top of the screen is what you’ll need to insert the image into the article so copying that now is a good idea. You’ll note this includes that prefix of “File:”
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg
Filenames in Wikimedia Commons
In the process of importing files over into Wikimedia Commons, all of the digital assets will have new filenames created for them. It’s worthwhile to analyze these briefly as they embed a great deal of useful information.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg
The first section of the filename is the “File:” prefix that identifies this string of characters as a filename in Wikitext.
File:
Next up is the title cross-walked from the metadata in the IIIF Manifest:
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources
Next we have a dash separating the different sections of the file name followed by “DPLA” to indicate where the file originated from.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA -
After that we have another dash followed by the unique identifier assigned by DPLA when the record was harvested.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94
If the original digital object in your local repository was a complex digital object that has since been transformed into a plethora of simple digital objects in Wikimedia Commons, that will be indicated by a page number in parantheses.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37)
Finally, if you use the aforementioned process to crop and edit images directly in Wikimedia Commons, the fact that the image is a derivative will be indicated by “(cropped)” and at the very end.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving iustries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped)Finally we have the file format extension, in this case, JPEG with an extension of “.jpg”.
File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg
Even if the complex object being ingested wasn’t actually a book, for instance a collection of photographs, the resulting filenames in Wikimedia Commons will still be differentiated as “pages.”
File:1630 Broadway Street, exterior views, 2019 - DPLA - 9923f13b736689f90ff60e4adf4005b9 (page 1).jpg
Finally, for the sake of completeness, here is an example of a simple digital object file name imported into Wikimedia Commons that has not been editted:
File:Manhattan Iron Works Company floor men - DPLA - c9e6a11fe7b4ad2de073adda9b261dd8.jpg
Inserting Images in Articles
A photograph of an explosive powder company certainly seems suitable to an article about explosives, and luckily Wikipedia has just such an article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive
This particular article contains a history section that would benefit from an image. There are two ways to insert images into Wikipedia articles, using the Visual Editing method (utilizing a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) style editor) and the Source Editing method, which edits the particular flavor of markdown text used by Wikipedia known as Wikitext. Both options will be covered in detail.
Visual Editing
To begin the editing process, click on the “Edit” tab in the top right of the screen in order to bring up the visual editing interface.
The page will look pretty similar but now there will be a toolbar on the top of the article that has all of the editing utilities. First place your cursor generally where you want the image to appear in the article, and then select “Images and media” from the “Insert” dropdown menu.
This will bring up a search box that will allow you to search for the specific cropped image, the file name which we had noted previously.
Click on the image to select the one you want to insert into the article. You don’t have to wait for the search to complete before selecting the image.
Click on the blue “Use this images” button in the top right of the “Media settings” box.
From here you can add a caption for the image that will show up in the article as well as alt-text for the image to increase accessibility. The “Advanced” tab in the “Media settings” box allows you to customize how the image will be displayed in the article. The standard settings (which is what you’ll see for most images appearing in articles) is for the image to float over to the right of the page, the size of a thumbnail with article text flowing around the image. Until you get more comfortable with this process, sticking with the standard appearance settings is a good way to go.
We now see the image inserted into the article, though we are still in the Visual Editing mode, the image hasn’t actually been added to the article. Click on the blue “Publish changes” button in the top right of the screen to actually finalize the edit. All edits require a reason for why the change is being made in order to document the work being done on the article. If you check the “Watch this page” option, the article will be added to a shortcuts list which is a handy way of gathering up all the articles being edited to track your work.
We now can see the image finally and officially placed in the article.
Source Editing
Editing images via the Source Editing option is very similar to the visual editing process; you’ll go through all the same steps you just do them in a slightly different fashion. To enable this mode, click on the “Edit” button in the top right of the screen as before, but this time click on the pencil-looking icon to change editing modes from the resulting dropdown menu.
This brings up a pretty dramatically different view. If you’ve got some basic HTML editing experience and created a website in school from scratch, this will probably look vaguely familiar. As previous mentioned the formatted text is actually Wikitext, a specific formatting language for creating rich text. The only aspects that we’re going to care about however are how to go about inserting images and not the many, many other options.
One of the advantages to editing with this method is precision. Sometimes when inserting images using the visual method you can put your cursor in one place and see ultimately that the image gets shoved far further down the page that you expected. Looking at the source-view allows you to see where the various elements are showing up in precisely the order in which they will be displayed on the page. Scrolling down to the history section of our previously uploaded image we can see how this is displayed in the Source Editing view.
The relevant text we care about is:
[[File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg|thumb|right|The Great Western Powder Company of Toledo, Ohio, a producer of explosives, seen in 1905]]First thing to note, the entire image object needs to be bounded in double brackets (“[[” and “]]”) before and after all the information you include. Inside those double brackets need to be a minimum of three things. First you’ll see the file name for the object beginning with the “File:” prefix that we got from the record in Wikimedia Commons.
[[File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpgAll the qualifiers in this string are separated by pipes (“|”, a fairly uncommonly used keyboard character.) Next we add a qualifier specifying how large we’d like the image to be, in this case using “thumb” to indicate a thumbnail sized image.
[[File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg|thumbNext up we want to add a qualifier indicating where on the page the image should be located. Leaving this element out is an option, as the default assumption is that images will float to the right side of the page as we saw in the Visual Editing portion above.
[[File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg|thumb|rightFinally we add one more pipe to this Wikitext block followed by the caption we would like to see displayed underneath the image. Don’t forget to put the closing double brackets at the end of the block as that will definitely screw things up on the page otherwise.
[[File:Year book - photo flashes showing Toledo's phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources - DPLA - ac95c5ef8efd2394c21e2b6edcd01d94 (page 37) (cropped).jpg|thumb|right|The Great Western Powder Company of Toledo, Ohio, a producer of explosives, seen in 1905]]Once we’ve entered in the information into the editing box, we scroll to the bottom of the page to enter in our comment for why we are making this edit, have the option to add the page to our watched pages, and can commit the edit to be publicly visible. I highly recommend using the “Show preview” option to see how the change will appear as this will prevent a lot of simple mistakes from accidentally being pushed live.
Once comfortable constructing those Wikitext strings, I’ve found this to be a much faster and simpler way to add images instead of using the Visual Editing option.
Another Way to Find Files in Wikimedia Commons
Finding a title like “Year book – photo flashes showing Toledo’s phenomenal progress, thriving industries and wonderful resources” as a simple search in Wikimedia Commons is pretty simple as it’s a nice long title with a high chance of being unique. What if you are looking for something shorter and more generic though, such as “Geography of Ohio”? In the search below, the book I’m looking for doesn’t even turn up in the first page of results, much less the first item.
However if I search for that same item in DPLA, the very first result is what I’m looking for.
What we’re after here in the DPLA record is the unique identifier that DPLA assigns, a nice long gloriously unique series of characters that is embedded in all the filenames of digital assets once they are imported over into Wikimedia Commons. We can find this in the URL of the page after opening the record from the DPLA search results page.
https://dp.la/item/aaba7b3295ff6973b6fd1e23e33cde14?q=Geography%20of%20OhioWhat we care about specifically is after the last forward slash and before the question mark. Everything after the question mark is the search I entered into DPLA. What we want is this:
aaba7b3295ff6973b6fd1e23e33cde14Once we search for this character string in Wikimedia Commons, particularly if you enter the string bound by quotation marks to only match this exact string, the book that we’re looking for should populate first.
"aaba7b3295ff6973b6fd1e23e33cde14"
More Advanced Use Cases
If you are looking for more advanced use cases than simply inserting thumbnail images across the right side of article pages, I would recommend bookmarking the Wikipedia Manual of Style related to images:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images
There is a wealth of documentation on formatting, positioning, and styling of images added to articles. Similarly there is a great deal of documentation about the creation of image galleries should you wish to insert a group of images into an article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Gallery_tag
John Michael Dewees 