GuildWars Wiki:Image use policy

This page is an official policy on GuildWars Wikia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Please use the talk page to propose changes.

Shortcut: GW:IMAGE

Regulation

The following rules are applied to all images and media uploaded to GuildWiki, any failure in these rules will result in the media being removed:

1. It is assumed that as a Guild Wars fansite images taken from in game are usable under Fair use rules.
2. Do not use images taken from the Official site with the exception of those found in the fansite kits.
3. Never use scanned images from magazine articles about Guild Wars or any image that another web page has been granted exclusive access to.
4. Images must not contain any artifacts, including credits or copyright details.
5. Use a clear, detailed title. Note that if any image with the same title has already been uploaded, it will be replaced with your new one.
6. Crop the image to highlight the relevant subject.
7. Use JPEG format for most images, PNG files do not scale well in this Wiki, and GIF files are usually of too low a quality.
8. The correct license tag must be attached to the image.

Notes

• When you upload your screen captures to GuildWiki, any one may modify this image. If it is felt that your image of that sword focuses more on your Elementalist who is holding it than on the sword itself, others may crop and re-upload the picture or simply upload a new picture of the item.
• The defining criterion of whether contributors will keep Image A or Image B of an item is the one most useful. This means the one that brings out the object of the image more clearly.
• See screen capture for information on taking good pictures in game.

Deleting images

• Add the following deletion notice text to the image description page.

{{Delete|reason for deletion}}

Image deletion related to a copyright issue must use a different tag, these are found at the Image license guide.

To actually delete an image after following the above procedure, you must be an administrator. Administrators must go to the image description page and click the (del) or Delete this page link.

Moving or renaming an image

The currently accepted method to move or rename an image is to:

1. Download the image to your hard disk.
2. Re-upload it again with a new file name.
3. Mark the old (incorrect file name) image page with a deletion tag noting that the image has been replaced by an exact duplicate of the file (for example, {{delete|This image has been renamed to new filename}}).

Image titles and file names

An uploaded image must have a descriptive file name.

File names should contain more then one generic name or description. For instance, a map of ascalon should not be named "Ascalon.jpg", instead it should be expanded on and named something like "Old Ascalon Map.jpg".

These steps should be taken before uploading an image:

1. Check for other images with a similar name or purpose.
2. Decide on if it should replace any of these images or be uploaded by itself.

Notes

• File names are case sensitive, "Ascalon.jpg" is not the same as "ascalon.jpg".
• Avoid using special characters in filenames or excessively long filenames.
• Images are not to be uploaded as "GW001.jpg" or in this format.
• Knowingly naming any uploaded media incorrectly (e.g. uploading a picture of a car with the image name Bog Skale.jpg) may result in short term ban.

Image details

Format

• All screen capture images used on GuildWiki should be in JPEG format.
• PNG images are used mostly for icons (profession icons like Image:Warrior-icon.png and skill effect icons like Image:Hex-degen.png) that will not be scaled as that can cause a severe decrease in image quality.

Uploaded image size

Uploaded files must be smaller than 16 megabytes. The GuildWiki software can resize images automatically, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself.

• Images should be kept under 150kb in size and a single page should rarely exceed more then 512kb.
• Skill icons should be under 4kb.
• User talk signature images have certain restrictions, see GW:SIGN.

Displayed image size

In articles, if you wish to have a photo beside the text, you should generally use the "thumbnail" option available in the "Image markup", or approximately 200-250 pixels of width if you're doing it manually. Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors.

Since mediawiki dynamically scales inline images there is no need to reduce file size via scaling or quality reduction when you upload images.

Content

• The use of images on Guildwiki is restricted to images related to the Guild Wars series, however the minor use of images not directly related to Guild Wars is acceptable on user pages.
• Uploading of any pornographic, advertising, illegal or patently offensive material will be immediately removed and may result in long term or permanent bans.