Help:Contents

General information

A larger set of help pages can be found in Wikipedia that you might want to consult:

• MediaWiki help contents and technical manual
• Meta-Wiki help contents and portal
• Wikipedia help contents and portal

Basic pages:

• Main Page, Welcome page, Community portal, Village pump, Help:Searching

Maintenance pages:

• Admin noticeboard, Deletion requests, Categories for discussion, Renaming a file, Renaming a category

Getting help:

• If you want to post a question about copyright issues that another editor will respond to, you can go here.
• If you have a general question about editing, uploading, the scope of the Wikimedia project, or anything else, you can post a question at the Help Desk and another user will reply.

The function of MediaWiki itself – the software that Wikimedia Commons runs on – is described at the MediaWiki User's Guide in Meta-Wiki. If you suspect a software bug, ask for feedback at the village pump, and then report it using the Phabricator bug report system. This is the only way to get MediaWiki developers to notice your bug reports.

The database of Wikimedia Commons can be downloaded. There is currently no dump of the media files available.

Contact us, General disclaimer, Privacy policy, Licensing

Wikimedia Commons help contents

Information for beginners:

• Commons:Sandbox (for experimenting)
• First steps: Account, Upload form, License selection, Quality and description, Sorting, File transfer and tools, Reuse, Structured data
• Frequently asked questions, Project scope, Category system, Language policy, Namespaces

Copyright information:

• Licensing, Copyright rules by territory, Copyright violations & deletion guidelines, Email templates

General information:

• Editor's index to Commons, Structured data

Software helpful for Wikimedia Commons:

• Media playback help
• Software and tutorials for editing media files
  • Video guide for uploading and using video files
  • Audio, Converting video, File types, Manipulating meta data
  • Help:Creating a DjVu file
  • Help:Scanning
  • Help:SVG
• Tools for making work in Commons easier
  • Upload tools

Content:

• Free media resources, Map resources, Image casebook (Copyright rules by subject matter), Problematic sources, Bad sources

Templates:

• Copyright tags, Tag categories, audio templates, Infobox templates, Taxobox, Template messages, language templates