Commons:Project scope/Pages, galleries and categories

This page is considered an official policy on Wikimedia Commons.

It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone must follow. Except for minor edits (such as fixing typos, or bringing information up to date), please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

General pages, galleries and categories

Technical note: this section relates to all content on Commons except that within the "File:" and "User:" namespaces.

The purpose of pages, galleries and categories is to support Commons' aims. Any page/gallery/category that does not fulfill that purpose is out of scope. Galleries and categories having no media file content are generally considered out of scope unless there is a particular reason for retaining them (e.g. a useful redirect).

Allowable page/gallery/category content

Allowable content includes:

Educationally useful, classified collections of images or other files, along with small amounts of explanatory text.
Text relating to Commons projects, help, policy, guidelines, licensing, copyright information and so on. All such text must be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation Licence
Operational pages, such as templates and the like, including Commons-operational program listings.

Non-allowable page/gallery/category content

Non-allowable content includes:

Excluded educational content
Content that does not advance Commons' aims, including advertising, self-promotion, and anything apparently created and/or uploaded for the purpose of vandalism or attack.

User pages, galleries and categories

Technical note: this section relates to pages within the User: namespace, in other words to pages having a name which starts "User:", and also to user categories.

Allowable user page/gallery/category content

User pages are generally reserved for personal profiles and information relevant to the user's contributions to Commons. All text must be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license and GNU Free Documentation Licence.

Personal galleries/categories are allowed provided the individual files are within scope, as described above. The project scope includes some images that are not educationally useful, including e.g. a photo of the Commons' user.

Script and skin pages such as Special:Mypage/common.js are permitted. See also an official guideline about user-specific galleries, templates and categories (COM:USER).

Non-allowable user page/gallery/category content

Non-allowable content includes:

Excluded educational content.
Private image or other file collections of no wider educational value.
Content that does not advance Commons' aims, including advertising or excessive linking to external domains and anything apparently created and/or uploaded for the purpose of vandalism or attack. Blatant self-promotion is prohibited, but regular Commons contributors are allowed a certain amount of leeway and discreet links to relevant web pages elsewhere are normally permitted.