One of my favorite stories I read this week was a post by Mike Dickison, a zoologist and active Wikipedian from New Zealand who helps with the weekly radio broadcast Critter of the Week (100,000 listeners!).
Dickison posted on Mastodon about a recent radio episode featuring Psylla frodobagginsi, an insect known as the hobbit kōwhai psyllid.
An insect he wrote about on Wikipedia.
What captured my attention about Dickison’s post was when he described the photo used in the Wikipedia article.
The photo was taken in 2022 by iNaturalist user Grey Smith who used the default iNaturalist photo license.
As it turns out, the default iNaturalist license is Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.
That’s a problem for anyone who adds or edits Wikiipedia articles: Wikipedia only allows images that can be usable by anyone.
Which meant Dickison couldn’t use the photo on the Wikipedia article.
So Dickison contacted Grey Smith, explaining how Wikipedia and Creative Commons worked.
And asked Smith about the license:
So I wrote to Grey Smith, explained how Wikipedia and Creative Commons worked, and asked if he’d be interested in releasing his photo under a more open licence.
Not only did he agree, he reset his default licence for all future photos, AND retrospectively changed the licence for his other 8,800 observations—so now they’re all available for Wikipedia too, and I’ve started using them to illustrate other articles
That’s so cool!
Dickison’s story confirms my faith in folks like Smith who learn something new (Wikipedia’s policy and Creative Commons licenses) and act on it.
As well as my belief that if you want change, education is key. And you need to ask for change.
Like Dickison did for the photo and license.
Or as I did in the past for podcast transcripts. And captions for videos.
About Psylla frodobaggnisi
Only found on New Zealand kōwhai trees around the South Island, Psylla frodobagginsi is a small light-colored plant-feeding insect with spotted wings.
First described by Francesco Martoni in a 2019 paper by Martoni and Karen Armstrong (their PhD advisor), it’s named after the character Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings.
From the Wikipedia article, I learned that much of the footage from The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was shot on South Island.
Appropriate naming for the insect!
Photo credit: Psylla frodobagginsi by Grey Smith, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International / Cropped from original.
