Commons:Project scope/Update 2013/Excluded educational content

Scope Review 2013 links: Discuss stage 2 of this review Translation Help your community by translating the review Background Main review page: Background and process FAQ Links to current rules Project Scope Photographs of identifiable people Discussion: Introductory Scope wording Aim of Wikimedia Commons Excluded educational content Discussion: Files Must be a media file Must be an allowable free file format Must be freely licensed or public domain Licensing terms Evidence Precautionary principle 'Realistically useful for an educational purpose' PDF and DjVu formats Discussion: Pages, galleries and categories General pages, galleries and categories User pages, galleries and categories Discussion: Areas of particular concern Censorship "Neutral point of view" Discussion: Identifiable people Lead Legal issues Consent Moral issues Identification Examples Removal requests Other image sources Other proposals Other proposals

Excluded educational content

Certain content is excluded from Commons, not because it is intrinsically non-educational, but because there are other Wikimedia Foundation projects that are more appropriate for hosting such content. This applies both to media files and to text.

Excluded educational content includes:

• Encyclopedia articles; these may be hosted on Wikipedia.
• News (this may be hosted on Wikinews), general weather reports, and the like.
• Files that contain nothing educational other than raw text. Purely textual material such as plain-text versions of recipes, lists of instructions, poetry, fiction, quotations, dictionary definitions, lesson plans or classroom material, and the like are better hosted elsewhere, for example at Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikiversity or Wikisource.

However, Commons can be used to host such material if included in a shareable media file that is of use to one of the other Wikimedia Foundation-hosted (WMF) projects, so scanned copies of existing texts that are useful to other WMF projects (e.g. to serve as the basis of a reliable, verifiable source) are in scope. Also allowed are files which embody something of value over and above raw text. For example, files consisting of scans of out-of-copyright books, newspapers and the like which preserve original font, layout, embedded images and the like are within scope.