Generally speaking, in editing a Wikipedia article, it is recommended to include or highlight the content/works created by others by properly citing them and listing them in the References. For images and other multi-media content that you think necessary to add directly to a Wikipedia page, you may follow the following steps:
- Consider finding your content from the repositories of materials in public domain. Here some repositories are listed. For example, UnSplash (for images) and Internet Archive (for all types of materials; please check the license situation for each case)
- Find out if the content is already in Wikipedia Commons. If not, find out if the content is under/out of copyright protection or available for free use.
- Please note that you need to upload the content to Wikimedia Commons before showing it in a Wikipedia article and Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content.
- In some cases, you wish to identify the copyright owner and contact the owner to ask if they may consider making the content under Creative Commons licenses, which give varied levels of permissions from liberal general redistribution to modifications being restricted. It takes time reaching the Asian authors/artists to make this happen but many scholars choose to do it when they wish to make the valuable content available online for more to see and use.
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