Help:Externally hosted images
Wikia - creating communities
The use of externally hosted images on Wikia sites is restricted. This usage has always been discouraged for the reasons below. Images are best uploaded locally instead and there are many benefits to doing that - see Help:Images for more details.
Please contact us if you would like a list of the pages on your wiki currently using external images, or post to the forum for general discussion.
Weighing up the options
The problems with usage of externally hosted images
- The author of the image is not attributed
- The license or copyright status of the image can not be found out
- The bandwidth of other sites is used unfairly
- The site owner may change the image, so what is displayed on the page is not what you intended. Sometimes this is done maliciously to discourage such usage
- The site may be taken down and the image lost
- Image related Wikia features can not be used
- Inappropriate images are used for vandalism and trolling
- The image cannot be resized
The benefits to uploading locally
- You can be sure the image won't disappear unless your wiki community decides to remove it
- The image will lead more people to your wiki via Google Image search
- You can find out what pages link to an image
- You can tag the image
- You can rate the image (in the new skins)
- You can browse through random images (Special:Random/image)
- You can make use of image maps
- You can create image galleries using the <gallery> tag
- You can display the image on a page at any size and choose to frame and caption it using extended image syntax
- You can attribute the creator and state the copyright status or fair use rationale of the image on its description page
- You can find out which images are used the most (Special:MostImages)
- You can categorize the image
- You can find out which images are not categorized (Special:UncategorizedImages)
- Only images that were uploaded by registered users can be used, decreasing the likelihood of inappropriate vandalistic images
- Uploading images adds to your edit count! (Special:EditCount)
Displaying externally hosted images
To display an externally hosted image, just paste the direct link to the image in the article. If the image link is on the whitelist, the image will appear. For example:
| URL | Produces |
|---|---|
http://images.wikia.com/help/images//thumb/b/b7/Gtk-ok.svg/60px-Gtk-ok.svg.png | 
|
Remember, this cannot be resized
Exceptions
Exceptions are made for Wikia sites and for sites that give permission to use their freely licensed images in this way.
This means that the French Dofus wiki can still use images from the Czech Dofus wiki, and the Star Wars Games wiki can still use images from Wookieepedia.
However, local uploads are still preferable for the reasons listed above.
If your community wants to make use of freely licensed images from sites that allow external image use, requests for exceptions can be made - see wikia:MediaWiki talk:External image whitelist.
