I bet you they didn't. Wouldn't be the first time a company thought RAID meant you didn't have to take backups.

It would be very ironic if the reason they were upgrading was partly that backups weren't working anymore.

I believe you can upload to Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) without article edits. Pictures placed there can be used by any Wikimedia project (including all the different language editions). You might want to try there -- or as David Gerard said above, put them on Flickr tagged CC-By-SA and put a comment on the talk page saying "I have these photos; could someone upload them?"

Heck, do so and email me; I'll put 'em up. (morven@byz.org)

Every contribution to Wikipedia is copyright by its contributor. Wikipedia owns the copyright to almost nothing on its site - only those portions created by employees of the Wikimedia Foundation.

What they do demand is it must be released under a license that allows fairly liberal re-use. No 'non-commercial'. No 'internet only'. No 'wikipedia only'. You can demand that your work be attributed and you can demand that derived works be licensed under the same terms as the original. Few other restrictions are acceptable.

If anyone told you this, they were badly misinformed, or you're not describing the situation accurately.

Wikipedia does not require you to give up your copyright or ownership; what they do require is that you license your images under an acceptable free license (the exact details of what's acceptable are on the site somewhere). You can definitely retain the right to be attributed as the creator of the image. You can also insist that any re-user must release their derived work under the same license.

In general, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (CC-By-SA) is the simplest and most common of these licenses; you can read its terms at creativecommons.org if interested.

Did you, perhaps, wish to have some other constraint on the images, for example restricting re-use (permission only for Wikipedia, or only for non-commercial use)?