User:Chowbok/Photo request boilerplate
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This is the boilerplate I've been using for mailing celebrities for photos. It's adapted from somebody else's on here, but I forget whose.
Substitute "Mr./Ms. [Whoever]" for "you" in the second paragraph if writing to somebody's agent or publicity firm.
Dear [whoever], I am one of the many volunteer editors of the English Wikipedia (wiki.riteme.site), the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia is among the most-visited sites on the Internet, ranking near the top ten according to the estimates of Alexa Internet (alexa.com). Unfortunately, our article about you at (http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/[Whoever]) currently lacks an image. I am aware that there are publicity images of you available, but since Wikipedia aims to be reproduceable even for profit and even in nations where generous United States "fair use" provisions in copyright law are inapplicable, we cannot use an image that is not released under a so-called "free license". Essentially, the copyright holder of any image that we use must irrevocably permit anyone else to use it, modify it, or sell it, with the only permissible requirements being that the author be named and that any modifications be released under an identical license. Example licenses that would permit us to use an image would be: the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode), or a simple "no rights reserved". Given Wikipedia's great popularity, I was hoping that you could provide us an image under such conditions. Please do consider this, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Kim Scarborough
It could use some improvement; it still mystifies a lot of people who are unfamiliar with copyright issues. I'm not sure how to make it clearer without leaving out important caveats, though.