Images

Wikipedia aims to distribute free content worldwide in any and all media—including the images used in its articles, and even images uploaded to its repository for potential use in articles. What does that mean to you? It means you can download almost all of these images to your computer, free of charge.

Images in Wikipedia Articles

If you see an image in a Wikipedia article that you'd like to have, just click it. You'll see a new page showing a larger image, as shown in Figure B-17.

The file Image:Fujisan from Motohakone.jpg is used in the article Tokyo. Clicking the thumbnail image in the article shows you this larger image, though not necessarily a full-sized image. Click "full resolution" to see the full-sized version. Right-click the full-sized image to save it to your computer. You can also save the image as your new desktop background image.

Figure B-17. The file Image:Fujisan from Motohakone.jpg is used in the article Tokyo. Clicking the thumbnail image in the article shows you this larger image, though not necessarily a full-sized image. Click "full resolution" to see the full-sized version. Right-click the full-sized image to save it to your computer. You can also save the image as your new desktop background image.

The vast majority of images on Wikipedia are free content—they're in the public domain or have Creative Commons licenses, for example. But if you come across an image labeled as a "fair use" image (a screenshot of a commercial software program, for example), don't treat it as free content. Don't download it unless you're sure you're not infringing a copyright by doing so.

The Commons

Several years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation realized that it didn't make sense to have images stored on language-specific Wikipedias, so ...

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