CartoonWiki:Rights primer
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Before you upload a scan, you need to be able to answer three questions. If you
cannot answer all three, upload the record anyway and say what is missing — an
honest gap is better than a blank that looks like nobody looked.
The three questions
- Who holds the right?
- A newspaper, a syndicate, an estate, a museum, or the artist. If genuinely
unknown, write "Unknown" and record what you searched.
- How do we know?
- This is evidence, and it is the field that matters. A dated email from
an estate. A licence agreement reference. A published statement. "Found on the internet" is not evidence. "Believed public domain" is not evidence either — say why it is believed: the year of publication, the death date of the artist, the jurisdiction.
- Under what terms may it be shown here?
- A named licence, a fair-dealing rationale, or a public-domain determination
with its reasoning.
What counts as evidence
| Situation | What to record |
|---|---|
| Permission from the rights holder | Who granted it, when, and a reference for the correspondence |
| Public domain by age | Country of first publication, year, and the rule you are relying on |
| Public domain by author's death | Death year and jurisdiction |
| Fair dealing / fair use | The specific purpose — criticism, review, reporting — and why a lower-resolution scan would not serve it |
| Archive holding under agreement | The holding institution and the agreement reference |
Recording it
Use {{Rights record}} on the file page:
{{Rights record
| holder = Daily Mail / Associated Newspapers
| credit = ''Daily Mail'', 12 March 1947
| source = National Library of Wales, NLW-ILL-0044
| evidence = Written permission from the estate, 12 March 2024
| licence = Fair dealing — criticism and review
| reference = RR-2026-441
}}
The file page turns that into a provenance panel and a credit bar. Until
evidence or reference is filled in, the file shows
Provenance missing in ochre and is listed at
Category:Files with no rights evidence.
If you are asked to take something down
Do not argue in an edit summary. Note the request on the file's talk page, tag the file, and raise it at CartoonWiki:Community portal. A rights holder asking is not an attack on the archive; it is the archive working.