[Foundation-l] 1.6 Billion USD to spare? How about liberationof some pictures

[Brian McNeil]

Wikinews has an unwritten policy of attributing images wherever reasonably
possible. Right down to naming photographers who've done government work or
through other means released material into the public domain.

I don't know if a similar approach would work for Wikipedia, but for news it
seems appropriate. Whenever you visit a mainstream media site you're likely
to see labels like "AFP" or "AP" on photos; doing something similar on
Wikinews encourages photographers to distribute links to articles featuring
their pictures - and to contribute more photos in future. A win all round.

It is up to Wikipedians to decide if such an approach for their project
would work. Considering some of the comments on corporate sponsorship I
could see people like Microsoft wanting to donate images just to get links
to their stuff in articles. On that basis I'd imagine many would be against
image crediting.


Brian McNeil
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of White Cat
Sent: 24 January 2008 13:52
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 1.6 Billion USD to spare? How about liberationof
some pictures

Majority of our readers do not come to wikipedia for our credit info. They
come to wikipedia to read about encyclopedic articles. We are an
encyclopedia we expect people to come here seeking an encyclopedia. Please
do not misinterpret what I said, citation is required per license and it
must be done. However it is impractical to do so in in-line text.

Also consider the case of 'User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me' say he
uploads 20 images for an article. The phrase 'Can't sleep, clown will eat
me' would be mentioned 20 times in the article. Now consider a username that
may imply an inflammatory remark when used in an article.

If you are going to 'credit' every image, why are you not crediting each
edit individually? You have the 'history' link to credit individual edits
and the 'image link' to credit the author(s) of that particular image. All
credit info is one click away.

So inline crediting can cause problems... Inline crediting brings wikipedia
absolutely no benefit whatsoever aside from being free advertisements to the
authors.

On Jan 24, 2008 12:41 PM, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Jan 24, 2008 11:21 AM, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >  Majority of our readers care not of the credit info.
>
> This statement lacks a citation. And even if it was true, it would not
> serve as an argument. What would be the effect if someone "proved" by
> a reasonable large survey that the majority of our readers do not care
> about the License of the text at all? I don't see any, except maybe
> the need for more education :)
>
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