User talk:Mrwikifix

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Hi. if you glance quickly through any of the other images in WP, you'll note that none of them are directly attributed, and most certainly do not embed the URLs of commercial websites in their captions or descriptions. WP has very, VERY strict policies regarding inappropriate links, and any attempts by editors to insert URLs, however benign in appearance, that are of a self-promotional nature is strictly forbidden, and subject to immediate removal without discussion by other editors. The best advice I can offer you is to look at all the other photographers' work that appears in WP, and simply follow their example. To see a good example of how a commercial, professional photographer submits photos for public use and still gets the credit they seek, including allowing people to track back to their commercial website, see the photo at [1]. The entry in Wikimedia Commons contains all of the details, and is simply LINKED TO in those WP articles in which the photo is used. The user has w a WP homepage, and the link to their commercial site appears there, rather than in any articles, or in the photo or its description in the Commons. Anyone who wants to know who the photographer is, and how to contact them, or buy images from them, can find out - but they have to do it themselves, instead of having the URL attached to the photo directly. There might even be editors who would find the link on the WP homepage to be a violation, and they might have a case; WP policy is not based on precedent, but a case-by-case intrepretation of the rules.

That being said, I will also point out that there are already too many photos in the Honey bee article, and even if you had not put in what looked like a copyrighted image, I would have at LEAST moved it into the gallery, if not removed it entirely - and probably moved it to the Western honey bee article, which is where it belongs, anyway. Moreover, WP is in the process of eliminating galleries from articles altogether, since it is, realistically, redundant to do so when the Wikimedia Commons already HAS all of the same images, already arranged in galleries. To include a huge assemblage of photos of honey bees on the Wikipedia page doesn't really serve a purpose when there is a honey bee page in the Wikimedia commons that has those photos and more ([2]). The questions I would ask are: (1) does your image show something that no other image already present shows? (2) Is it of significantly better quality than existing images, and therefore a suitable replacement for an existing image? I am of the inclination that if you couldn't answer yes to either of those, objectively, then the best choice is to add your image to the Wikimedia Commons, and then let OTHERS decide whether that image has a place in Wikipedia (like the photographer whose image I linked to above; other people discovered this image, and made use of it, without any acts of self-promotion). The bottom line, really, is whether the placement of an image is an attempt at self-promotion; any time a photographer adds one of their own images, that issue is raised, and your first attempt did cross that line - it wasn't anything personal, I assure you. Dyanega 00:27, 16 October 2007 (UTC)