I kinda always assumed that except for cover art you are only allowed to add pictures to entities if the picture is freely licensed, but I don’t find any such restriction in the guidelines.
Did I just not find that guideline or can I really link to any external image (I guess it’s not piracy if you don’t reupload the picture?)?
The general guidelines for URLs apply:
Do NOT link to pages which contain pirated material.
It is linked from the documentation of every image relationship so far: for artist, instrument, label (with additional guidelines), place, and deprecated for release.
Maybe some of additional guidelines for label logo should also apply to other relationship types. Please feel free to suggest improvements. Documentation and guidelines always need reviews.
Edit: I moved your topic to the category MusicBrainz > Style.
Well yes that is self-evident.
But I can link a proprietary picture from it’s original source?
Note that just adding a link to a picture will not actually display the picture. MusicBrainz will only show images from CAA, Amazon, and Wikimedia Commons for now.
I’m not aware of any restrictions for linking images (other than that the “has cover art at” URL-Release relationship is deprecated and shouldn’t be used anymore 
).
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Yeah I kinda just found that out the hard way.
Will an image from CAA be displayed if linked to e.g. an artist?
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No, only Commons images for artists, labels and places, only CAA and Amazon for releases.
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So basically to have an artist image on their MB page there not only needs to exist a freely-licensed picture of the artist, but also enough info to write a Wikipedia article (if no Wikipedia article exists the image will be removed from Wikimedia Commons).
Shouldn’t we allow freely licensed pictures from a source where you can mark an image with a license (e.g. flickr)? I think it would be really helpful to have pictures of lesser-known artists to help with crediting the correct artist. E.g. if there is a music video where the featured artist appears I can compare it with the artist image on their MB page to verify it’s the same artist.
Also pictures of the artist from a booklet from the CAA could help.
And a related question: Is it possible to tell MB with image to choose if Wikidata has more than one? E.g. for Craig G I found an image where I think he is more recognizable and marked it with “preferred rank” on Wikidata but on his artist page the old picture is still shown.
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I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it should be something editors do manually in MB, but I agree it should take Wikidata ranks into account. Could you add a ticket for this?
Is this specifically for artists? (because of self-promo?). I’ve uploaded nature photos that aren’t used anywhere but haven’t been removed
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Done. Don’t know if I did everything correctly though as it’s my first ticket.
Okay to be honest I haven’t seen any policy about this yet - I’ll look into it.* I have just seen some Beginner-MB-editors/Beginner-Wiki-editors/artists upload their pictures with was then deleted.
*PS: A file on Wikimedia Commons “must be realistically useful for an educational purpose”. I guess pictures of artists on MB should meet that rule.
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I have uploaded one artist image to wikimedia commons and created a wikidata entry to link the two.
The wikidata entry was deleted but I was able to argue to get it restored.
See the notability requirements for wikidata:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Notability
While we may not be able to meet requirement 1 we should be able to argue requirement 2 and 3.
- It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity. The entity must be notable, in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly available references. If there is no item about you yet, you are probably not notable.
- It fulfills some structural need, for example: it is needed to make statements made in other items more useful.
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Well done and thanks.
Your approach seems a way in which Wikimedia could get to see that MB entities getting wikimedia entries poses little or no threat to their model.
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