Anyone feel like donating photos of their trombones for use on Wikipedia?

[jonathanharker]

Hi folks, I'm new here, but I've been busy re-organising and updating the trombone-related articles on Wikipedia. There are now hopefully half-decent articles on cimbasso and bass, contrabass, alto, soprano, and valve trombones, which were all bodged into one "types of trombone" article which was a bit silly. There's even a superbone article.

However, what they lack is usable images. For use on Wikipedia, the images must be released to the public domain or a non-NC Creative Commons license (i.e. commercial use cannot be forbidden). There is a surprisingly small number of well-taken, high resolution photographs of trombones on Wikimedia Commons - and for the contrabass, essentially none.

If anyone would like to take a good photograph of their trombone, with a neutral (preferrably white) background, I would be super grateful. The process is a bit complicated but it is essentially sign up to Wikimedia Commons (you can use your Wikipedia account if you have one) and follow along with the upload wizard. It is best if you upload your own photos (rather than someone else's) so you can explicitly licence them as CC0/public domain, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA. The bonus is you get your horn on a Wikipedia article!

Bonus points if you have any of the following: bass trombone with independent Thayers or Hagmanns; any uncommon valves (Greenhoe, Bach K valve, Conn CL2000 Lindberg valve, Rotax rotary, etc.); a Haag cimbasso with five Hagmann valves (!!!); any alto trombone, with/without a valve (trill, or B♭); any contrabass in F, or double-slide C or B♭; any model of Superbone (Holton, Wessex, Schagerl Morrison rotary model).

Any help in this regard would be super super helpful towards assuaging my (probably slightly unhealthy) sense of incompleteness around the whole thing. Cheers in advance!

[SwissTbone]

I'm more than happy to donate all the pictures I have on my website. Is that the style of pictures you're looking for?

[jonathanharker]

Truly, WOW, that would be amazing! If you don't want to upload them yourself, would you be able to put up a statement on the website somewhere (e.g. the footer) to the effect that "images are CC0/By/SA (etc. whichever one you prefer) unless stated otherwise" - or however you want to word it obviously - then I can take care of the rest. Thanks again, so much!

[SwissTbone]

I'm a complete newbie to this. If I share p8ctures in the CC BY license. What would that mean to the user and your use on Wikipedia?

[patrickosmith]

Yes I might be interested in providing a few pictures of most rare "Frank Holton 168" tenor trombone.
I need to take a number of photos before converting the closed wrap to an open wrap anyway.

How do we get you the photos to you?

[jonathanharker]

I'm a complete newbie to this. If I share p8ctures in the CC BY license. What would that mean to the user and your use on Wikipedia?

Fair enough - it's a bit complicated but I'll try to explain. The CC-BY licence means that anyone is free to use your image, for any purpose (including commercial use), as long as they attribute you as the author. So, on Wikipedia we would need to say something like this in the caption - "Nifty tenor trombone in B♭ by S.E. Shires. Photograph by SwissTbone" (or whatever you say your name is). Usually this is enough for your photograph not to be sucked up into the usual Getty/Shutterstock money-mills, because they would have to attribute you. Additionally, Wikimedia and the big image banks have come to an uneasy truce, so they tend to monitor/handle separately anything uploaded to Commons (the image bank for Wikipedia). If you want to further limit commercial use, then using the CC-BY-SA licence will help. SA stands for "Share Alike", which means that derivative works must use the same licence; i.e. anyone building on or incorporating your images must also use the CC-BY-SA licence for their work, which usually precludes the sort of rent-gathering and money-milling operations run by Getty Images and their ilk. On the other hand, it just so happens that the entire corpus of Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons is compatibly licensed for this use!

In summary, if you're not a professional photographer and relying on your images for meals, CC-BY is a good compromise. For example, I noticed the cimbasso article didn't have a photo, so I took a photo of the Meinl-Weston cimbasso I was playing for an opera a few years ago, uploaded it, and added it to the Wikipedia article. When researching stuff for the article this year, I found my photo on someone's blog quite by chance, with my name credit. Now things have gone full circle, because I'm citing that article on the contrabass trumpet article!

[jonathanharker]

Yes I might be interested in providing a few pictures of most rare "Frank Holton 168" tenor trombone.
I need to take a number of photos before converting the closed wrap to an open wrap anyway.
How do we get you the photos to you?

Hi there - if you want to have a go at uploading them to Commons yourself, so you get a chance to describe it (name, image caption, your preferred author displayed name, etc.) then it's super easy, you can:

1. Go to Wikimedia Commons, and if you haven't got one already, create an account - it only needs a username, password, optional email (and a captcha).
2. Use the Upload wizard to upload a photo. This will ask you what licence you want to release it with, your author name if you choose one with attribution (BY), and what we're looking at - caption, optional categories, tags, etc.

Otherwise, I'm happy with a link to a Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc. (anonymous access preferred). Please let me know in there (e.g. a text file, or something) what you want your author name, captions, etc. to be. I can't always guess what instrument I'm looking at

And thanks again folks for volunteering, it will be nice to have some decent images to use around the place on Wikipedia. I want to overhaul material from the "Brass instrument valve" "rotary valve" and "piston valve" articles, and the "F-attachment" and "Valves" sections of the "trombone" article, possibly into a new article about trombone valves; Istr seeing someone doing a trombone valve dissertation or essay for their university work... endlessly fascinating! (update: link)

[patrickosmith]

Thanks for the detailed instructions.
I'll plan to do this but it may take a while as it is a very busy time for me right now.

[SwissTbone]

Truly, WOW, that would be amazing! If you don't want to upload them yourself, would you be able to put up a statement on the website somewhere (e.g. the footer) to the effect that "images are CC0/By/SA (etc. whichever one you prefer) unless stated otherwise" - or however you want to word it obviously - then I can take care of the rest. Thanks again, so much!

Added some text to the footer of my website. Is that enough?

[jonathanharker]

Added some text to the footer of my website. Is that enough?

Yes, truly amazing, thank you so much!

[jonathanharker]

Added some text to the footer of my website. Is that enough?

So far thanks to your images I have been able to update images on the Hagmann valve, Axial flow valve and Trombone § Valve types. Thanks again!

[SwissTbone]

Cool! Happy to help!