Help:Licenses

Licensing

A feature of MediaWiki allows the Special:Upload Page to streamline licensing of images. Wikipedia's Upload Page has a Licensing drop down box below image summary. This feature is turned off in default MediaWiki. To turn this feature on a sysop needs to edit Licenses in the MediaWiki namespace (example: MediaWiki:Licenses). S/he can do this by going to the MediaWiki:Licenses page of their wiki and clicking 'create' or 'edit'.

The page MediaWiki:Licenses expects a certain format in a wiki list.

• subst:license 1|license 2|License text
• Header 1:
  • cc-by-sa-2.5|Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

Line 1 will produce "License text" and substitute the license 1 template in the image page and transclude license 2. Line 2 will show a greyed out header with text "Header 1:" Line 3 will produce "Attribution ShareAlike 2.5" and transclude template cc-by-sa-2.5 on the image page.

For detailed real world example, see Wikipedia:MediaWiki:Licenses or Commons:MediaWiki:Licenses.