Wikiportrait

Technical document about version 2 of Wikiportrait

for the 2024 initiative in the US, see WikiPortraits

Wikiportrait is a project started by Wikimedia Nederland to gather portraits of well-known Dutch people like television hosts, sportsmen and musicians for use on Wikipedia articles. The Dutch website is hosted at www.wikiportret.nl. The website runs on Wikiportrait software, an open source package designed to simplify choosing a license for images for users and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons.

Why Wikiportrait?

The whole reason why we started with this project was mainly because of the complicated way of uploading images on Wikimedia Commons. It's currently too much information to read for someone who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about licenses and Mediawiki software, and someone who only wants to upload a single or a few photo's.

The System

The current software is a PHP system, using a MySQL database as a backend for saving the metadata on the images and for the questions and explanations in the 'license wizard'. Every other page you see on the site (including the uploadform, Dutch) is more or less 'static' and simply a HTML file. Most messages and questions are kept in a database to simplify translation. The 'static pages' have to be translated in their HTML form and can not currently be entered in a database.

License for the Wikiportrait software

The Wikiportrait software is (c)2008 by Hay Kranen (User:Husky). Wikiportrait is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Procedure

Currently when someone wants to upload a picture on the Wikiportet.nl site they have to go through this sequence:

User reads the introduction on the homepage, clicks on 'Start the uploadwizard'
Answers yes/no to simple questions about the image, with expandable boxes with extra explanation
The uploadwizard gives a final advice on the image: either 'Do not upload' or presents a link to the uploadform
The user first reads some terms and conditions before clicking the 'Upload my image' button, the uploadform appears then
User fills in the subject of the photograph, their e-mail address and 'real name' and the photographer or rights owner of the photograph. A date and description is optional. The user can select a license, by default this is set to a dual-license: CC-BY / GFDL.
The user browses to their file and ticks the checkbox with the terms and conditions
The image is uploaded, checked for resolution (the minimal size is 640x480 to prevent people from uploading stuff from Google Images) and given a unique name (a combination of the original file name and a sequence of random numbers)

This last part was implemented because we couldn't easily achieve a link between Wikimedia Commons and Wikiportrait. It seems to work quite well by now, but will not scale to more than a few images per day

An e-mail is sent to the VRT volunteers from the Dutch Wikipedia with a link to the image and the information the user entered in 5). The VRT volunteers send a confirmation e-mail to the address provided in step 5 to check if the e-mail address is valid and the uploader is still content with placing their image under a free license.
After receiving the confirmation e-mail the image is uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the VRT volunteer, given a {{Wikiportrait}} template and added to the article on the Dutch Wikipedia. The image is, where possible, also coupled to the Wikidata item for the person on the image. This connection is made by a dedicated bot, WikiportraitBot.
The volunteer sends an e-mail to the uploader, telling them the image is available on Wikipedia.
Hooray!

Results

For results see the category on Commons with uploaded pictures.

Contact

Contact Ellywa for more information on this project.
For more information about the code behind the project, contact Mbch331.
For more information about WikiportraitBot, contact Daniuu.