search engines Find the Article As soon as an article such as Artie is created, it will be indexed and findable using Wikipedia's built-in search. General-purpose search engines will be able to find Artie within a few weeks or sometimes even sooner--within a day or two for Google. Once registered by search engines, Artie will have much greater promi- nence on the Web. People searching the Web generally, not specifically looking for a Wikipedia article, will begin to read the article as it shows up in their search results. This can have a good or bad effect on the article's quality. Experts in the topic may contribute to it, but random outsiders could also commit vandalism. For Artie's sake, we hope that he is now on some attentive editors' watchlists. New relatives Over time, Artie's content will propagate outward in two ways: It will be copied verbatim, and it could be translated into other languages. Within about a month, non-Wikipedia websites will grab Artie's content and reprint it in full. These mirrors are perfectly legal as long as they respect the GFDL license. As these copies spread across the Web, Artie's content on Wikipedia can stay more relevant by being continuously updated. Artie's content might also be translated to provide content for Wikipedias in other languages. These new wiki articles may attract further edits, and their con- tent may begin to diverge from the original article. One caveat: If Artie contains mistakes, so will Artie's mirrors and transla- tions--and even if the mistake is fixed in Artie, it will remain on the mirror sites (at least until the mirror sites refresh their content from the latest version of Wikipedia) and in translations (until someone corrects it manually). Getting the Picture A picture is a worth a thousand words. Eddie might be tempted to find a relevant image somewhere on the Inter- net, upload it to Wikipedia, and add it to his article, but unless the image is public domain or GFDL-licensed (and most are not), this addition will lead to nothing but trouble. Non-free images are aggressively deleted from Wikipedia; they live only as long as cut flowers--a few days at most. Instead, Eddie might take a photograph himself (or create a graphic). Or he might search for relevant images in other Wikipedia articles or on Wikimedia Commons. 296 | Chapter10