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Using Wikis to Find and Organise Images

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Summary

Wikis are websites that allow groups of users to collaborate on content creation. Although largely text-based, they can include images. This document looks at ways in which you might use wikis as a source of images for use in your own work. It also provides an overview of how wikis handle images for those who already use or are thinking of setting up a wiki.

Introduction
What is a wiki?
Finding images in wikis
Some important considerations when using images you’ve found within wikis
Using images in wikis
Conclusion

1. Introduction

Wikis are often described as examples of ‘social software’ - web-based software that enable easy communication or interaction. A fuller definition is provided below, but essentially a wiki enables people to collaboratively write web content.

Some wikis are useful sources of free-to-use images, and this document will help you discover the best ways of finding such images.

Unlike image blogs, wikis are not really designed as tools for specifically managing or presenting a collection of images. However, this document will help you understand how wikis deal with images. If you are looking for a simple way to organise your images, please see our advice on Using Blogs to Find and Organise Images and Photo Sharing Sites. For advice on more involoved image management solutions our Systems for Managing Digital Media Collections.

Those working in education can use wikis to support their own work and their institutions’ strategic objectives for learning, teaching and research and business and community engagement (BCE).

2. What is a wiki?

A wiki is a website that enables many people to edit the same content. Often there is a database underlying the wiki, which stores and manages its content. The first wiki was created in the mid 1990s as a tool for discussion and collaboration between programmers - you can still see (and edit) it here. However, wikis really took off with the development of Wikipedia from 2001.

Their openness and easy alteration mean there are pros and cons to using wikis:

Pros

Collaborative - Wikis encourage and enable groups of people to share in the creation of content.
Easy to use - Wikis use a relatively simple syntax (mark-up), making them quick and easy to edit.
Minimal system requirements - Internet access is all that is required - no additional software to install.
Enables version control - Because the wiki stores a full history of edits, it is possible to see how the content has developed (and to roll it back to an earlier version, if necessary).

Cons

Vandalism or misinformation - There is potential for anyone with access to the wiki to remove existing information or add false or biased content.
Concerns about authority - It can be difficult to judge the accuracy of a wiki entry, because incorrect information may have been inadvertently or deliberately added.
Problem of stability - Wikis are often continually changing, making them difficult to quote or reference with confidence.
Not always democratic - Although in theory wikis are collaborative, in practice there can be an imbalance in contribution, with confident contributors dominating and others holding back because they’re uncomfortable about altering other people’s work.

While there are clearly some risks in creating or using wikis, these should not be overstated. General sites like Wikipedia tend to be quite strongly policed, with vandalism quickly spotted and corrected. More specialist sites often control who can view them or who is allowed to edit. The use of wikis is always likely to involve elements of trust and risk, but in more controlled wiki environments reputation will often play an important role in ensuring that there are good quality, well-researched and well-illustrated contributions.

Screenshoot of Wikipedia's entry for 'Eye'
Screenshot of the Wikipedia article for ‘Eye’: note how the content on the live site differs from this screenshot which was taken in 2007. Images are by Petr Novák (Human eye) and David L. Green (Dragonfly eye).

3. Finding images in wikis

Given the wide availability and functionality of photoblogging and photo sharing software, we have not seen the development of ‘photowikis’. A rare exception is Wikpedia’s Wikimedia Commons site, which includes millions of images - and audio and video files - licensed for anyone to use.

Although wikis remain predominately word-based, most wikis enable contributors to incorporate images into their pages and many people choose to do so. Some wiki software also has plugins available for creating galleries.

Wiki pages can often be found via general search engines and occasionally their images are included among the search results of image search engines. The following tools can also be useful in searching for wiki content. Unfortunately none of these will enable you to limit your search to images:

WikiIndex - a large directory of wikis, browsable by category
Wikinside - searches 3000+ wikis
Qwika - searches 1000+ wikis

4. Some important considerations when using images you’ve found within wikis

If you’re hunting for images and succeed in finding a good one via a wiki, you’ll then need to consider whether you can or should use it. The image might not be of the size or quality that you need, or there may be some legal or ethical issues to address.

4.1 Copyright

The fact that an image has been made freely available on the web does not automatically entitle anyone to copy it: most online images are subject to some restrictions. Look carefully for indications of copyright, but note that © symbols or “All rights reserved” statements are not required - copyright is automatic and does not need to be asserted in any way.

Helpfully, people are increasingly making their content available under simple and standardised Creative Commons (CC) licences. All the content on the above-mentioned Wikimedia Commons is either in the public domain or available under Creative Commons licences. The following pages are also useful in locating CC content:

If you do see a Creative Commons symbol, you should click on the licence to check your obligations. Also be aware that sometimes people wrongly assign licences to material that isn’t really theirs, and that a CC licence at the bottom of a page doesn’t necessarily mean that all the images contained within that page are intended to be included.

If you are in any doubt about the status of an image - or you want to use a work that you know to be in copyright - contact the owner of the wiki. You will often find that people are very happy for you to use their image and are grateful that you’ve asked.

4.2 Ethical concerns

You may also need to think about ethical issues. Photos may include other people, sometimes caught unawares or in embarrassing settings. Sometimes, in the context of citizen journalism, images may depict people in pain or caught up in traumatic events. Although these might be made available under a Creative Commons licence, there may be good reasons not to use them. If in doubt, contact the wiki owner or consider finding a different image.

4.3 Quality

Many of the images included within wikis are of poor quality to begin with and can be compromised further by software that automatically resizes them to fit into template.

If you need a large or good quality image (e.g. for printing), it is often worthwhile contacting the wiki owner to see whether they have a better quality version you can use or purchase.

5. Using images in wikis

If you want to establish a wiki, there are many different wiki ‘engines’ (the name given to wiki software) that you can to choose from. For a useful and up-to-date list, see Wikipedia’s software list. See also its comparison charts, and especially the WikiMatrix which enables you to easily compare features across two or more wikis. It records the following image-related features: “image linking”, “image editing”, “image galleries” and “image syntax” (i.e. the coding used to link or embed images).

Many of the leading wiki engines are intended to be downloaded and run on your own server and are open source (i.e. you have access to all of the code and can make any changes you want). They will, however, generally require someone with programming experience to set-them up and they may also need to run on particular operating systems.

There are a few hosted wiki services (often called ‘wiki farms’). These sometimes make use of open source wiki software and sometimes develop their own proprietary wiki engines. Some of these hosted services are free, but others will require you to pay a subscription or will offer both free and ‘premium’ options. If you want to set up a wiki covering a popular topic of interest and are happy for anyone to contribute to it, then you should have no problem finding someone to host it for you. However, if you require a secure, password-protected wiki for a narrow purpose and select group of people, then you should expect to have to pay for it. Wikipedia provides a useful comparison of wiki farms.

5.1 Common approaches to incorporating images in wikis

Like blogging software, the various wiki engines handle images in different ways. You will usually find there is some facility for uploading an image to a wiki and some code or syntax that must be used to display the image within the page - although the mechanisms and syntax will differ from one wiki to the next (as examples given in the next section will show). It is also common to find third-party software that can be ‘plugged in’ to a wiki engine to enable it to display its images a little better or to create galleries of images.

One common feature of blogs is noticeably absent from wikis: the pushing in of images from external image collections. There is, for example, no button within Flickr or other photo sharing services saying “Wiki this image”. This is because of a fundamental difference in the way blogs and wikis work.

Blogs and wikis can both be thought of as time-based resources: they develop over time and keep within them a record of that development (the blog “calendar” or wiki “history”). However, while a blog is essentially a succession of static postings (or comments on postings), the text of a wiki is (potentially) entirely dynamic. It evolves over time, with text and images being added, subtracted, and polished - so there is no obvious or permanent place within a wiki environment that you could blog or moblog your image to! In the wiki environment, images cannot automatically drop into place, but must be deliberately chosen, uploaded and placed. See also our advice on Using Blogs to Find and Organise Images.

5.2 Image functionality offered by some common wiki software

We briefly describe here the ways in which some of the most popular wiki engines handle images. Note that all of these engines are free and open source. Here we just focus on image functionality but you can also use WikiMatrix to compare their full range of features.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the software that underlies Wikipedia, and much of its development has been driven by the functionality required for Wikipedia. Unlike some other wiki software, MediaWiki does not provide a graphical WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. This means that you must learn MediaWiki’s coding or ‘syntax’ to take advantage of its image and gallery features. This syntax is described on the MediaWiki ‘Images Help’ page and on the MediaWiki ‘Images and Other Uploaded Files Help’ page.

Wikipedia offers its own extensive help with using images, which may also be worth consulting. In addition to uploading and embedding images, MediaWiki lets you determine their size and position, add captions and ‘alt’ text, and fairly easily create galleries.

There are many third-party extensions available for MediaWiki (‘extensions’ is its term for plugins). Some of these enable MediaWiki to work much better with images or to link to images within external image collections or photo sharing sites. The best place to find these extensions is the MediaWiki Extension Matrix.

The screenshot below shows the text and syntax that lies behind the ‘Eye’ article screenshot (above). This is the kind of display you see if you hit the ‘Edit’ button of a MediaWiki wiki.

Screenshot showing an 'Edit' page in Wikipedia
Screenshot of the Wikipedia editing page for the Eye article

TWiki

Unlike MediaWiki, TWiki comes with both a syntax-based and graphical WYSIWYG interface. Inserting an image within a TWiki page is as easy as clicking an image button and entering its URL. It is also possible to reference and display images held elsewhere within TWiki or on the web.

More sophisticated image features are available in some of TWiki’s extensions or plugins. Some may find the ImageGalleryPlugin of particular use.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki does not have a graphical WYSIWYG editor, so you’ll need to learn its syntax. The DokuWiki syntax is similar to MediWiki’s except that it uses {{ }} rather than [[ ]] for images, and it provides fewer options for formatting the image. Some general guidance on using images in DokuWiki is available, and this page outlines the syntax for images.

If you’re uploading images to your DokuWiki rather than referencing external images, then this is done via the MediaManager. Although MediaManager does not enable you to resize or edit the image itself, it does usefully give you access to the EXIF and IPTC metadata that is sometimes held within the file (this is camera or cataloguing information). Some of this data can also be edited and displayed within MediaManager.

As with other wiki engines, a wide range of plugins are available for DokuWiki, some of which will be of assistance in managing or displaying images. One plug-in enables you to embed an automatically created image gallery into a DokuWiki page.

MoinMoin

MoinMoin has both syntax-based and graphical WYSIWYG editing. It handles images in a similar way to TWiki: you can upload image files to a page and then display them within that page by creating a reference to them. Alternatively, you can reference and display images held elsewhere within the wiki or the wider web by putting in a full link to the image file.

Images are little mentioned within MoinMoin’s help documentation, so it’s best to start with the following documents: Help on Attaching Files and Help On Linking. There are some additional tools available to help extend MoinMoin’s image use. These generally take the form of plugins, actions or macros, for example, the Gallery Macro.

6. Conclusion

Wikis can be very useful sources of images. There can be some challenges in finding these images, since they are not well represented in standard image search engines.

As with any image you find online and want to use, you will need to consider carefully the quality of the images you have found and whether you can legally or ethically use them without seeking permission. However, there can often be advantages to contacting the owner - and the social nature of these technologies will often support and reward a more personal approach.

Most wiki engines have some capacity for easily incorporating images, though if you are looking for a specific tool for organising and presenting a collection of images, you will find that image blogs and dedicated photo sharing sites do a better job.

JISC Digital Media has other information about social software, and about finding and using images: