If you are like me, over a number of years of attending great music events I have on occasion taken my camera and used it to make some musical images that please me. For years (40+ in my case) I have selected the best ones and placed them in albums which sit in a cupboard (pre-digital days) or on my computer (nowadays) where they reside, mostly unseen and unknown to others... and if (deities forbidding) something were to happen to me tomorrow, they would most probably be disposed of to the nearest rubbish facility...

More recently, I looked through Wikipedia at pages on artists I had some admiration for and was surprised to find that a non-trivial component had no pictures of the artist(s) concerned. The reason for this, it turns out, that although good pictures may be around, they are not in a form that Wikipedia can use - basically they have to be freely reproducible by anyone, not copyrighted, and not restricted to just non commercial use. (For example a " Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike" license, which means that anyone can do what they like with the image, but they have to maintain attribution to the original creator).

I realised that I had images in my holdings that could fill some of these gaps and at the same time, I could ensure some degree of longevity for my images which would otherwise almost certainly be lost some time down the track. I also figured that "giving away" reproduction rights was no big deal in my case, since I had no plans ever to commercialise them.

So to cut to the chase, I decided that uploading a selection of my images to Wikimedia Commons (which serves as the "feeder" repository for Wikipedia content) would serve several different purposes at the same time: first, provide some useful content that could be incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles; second, ensure the future preservation of those images at no cost or ongoing effort to me; and third, provide a degree of exposure of those images to others who might enjoy or value seeing them, not only now but in a future that we perhaps cannot even envisage (think of the value now of historic images from 100 or even 50 years ago).

So this is my experience - no particular down side in the 3 years or so that I have embarked on this - and I would be happy if I can persuade others to do the same if interested, and let some more music pictures loose into the world to see what happens. I know they are out there! - or, get reactions from other mudcatters on the above.

As I mentioned in a related thread yesterday, I maintain an index to images I have uploaded in the form of my Wikipedia user page (something which comes with contributing edits or new pages to Wikipedia), which you can visit here if interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony_1212#Music_related_2

Any comments or other experiences welcome...

Regards - Tony