Wikipedia:Example requests for permission

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:BRP WP:ERP WP:ERFP

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For more on requesting permission, and advice what to ask, see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission

This page is intended as boilerplate text for requesting permission to re-use somebody else's content in Wikipedia. To do this, they must re-license it under the Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution-ShareAlike, CC0 or a compatible license. For more, read Wikipedia:copyrights. Some other licenses are permitted for images; see Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for more. It cannot be licensed under GFDL alone.

If you have a letter that has worked in requesting permission, please add it to this page, or work the text that you think was effective into the existing letters. Make sure you get the author to contact permissions-commonswikimedia.org directly or have them add that address to the recipients as a carbon copy. Just sending a copy of your request and response to permissions-commons is not sufficient.

You can also ask the author to release their work under a free license publicly, for example by changing the license on Flickr or YouTube or adding a statement to their website. If the author agrees to this, make sure you ask a license reviewer from Commons to review the image. (Note: as not all license reviewers are active users, you may want to make your request at the copyright village pump instead.) If you've uploaded the image to the Commons you can also do this by adding {{licensereview}} to the image file page. (Wikipedia currently does not have its own license reviewers.)

Due to the large number of ambiguous answers to enquiries concerning permission for reuse for an image (such as "I allow Wikipedia to reuse my photos"), it is advisable to ask the author to use the Wikimedia VRT release generator. As an alternative, you can attach a standard declaration of consent to your enquiry email. See Wikipedia requesting copyright permission, Wikipedia declaration of consent and Commons email templates.