Rama Rama ramaneko@gmail.com wrote on wed, 23 jan 2008 10:32:11 +0100 and since it has been such a long time I decided to use some kind of full quote :)
Yesterday, I exchanged a few e-mails with a professional photographer to confirm the licencing status of some of his work on Commons. I discovered someone willing to confirm the licence, but evidently quite disgruntled by his experience of Commons. Two lessons can be learned from what I read:
- We are victims of a paradox which forces us to be especially annoying
with the most precious of our occasional contributors. A significant proportion of the high-quality photographs of celebrities uploaded on Commons are copyvios. This forces us to be especially strident with copyright issues towards well-meant photographers. Short of the most courteous civility, repeated requests amount to downright harassment, and may appear to question the word of the uploader. I don't have a magic formula to break the paradox itself, but we should make efforts to sensibilise our users: DO:
- be extremely polite
- apologise for bothering people with seemingly superfluous paperwork
- apologise for seemingly doubting their word
- offer to help and advise personally if the user needs anything
Commons-related
- formulise the request in such a way that a simple "OK" from the user
is sufficient. Open-ended questions are creepy ("what next, my credit card number ?") and bothering ("how many bleeding mails will I have to send before they are content with what I gave them ?"). DON'T:
- assume that the user knows all of our rules. We are there to guide them.
- assume that the user is aware of problems that we encounter as Commons
administrators (typically, that most photographs that look like his are copyvios).
What about a page or section on a page explaining all this stuff (except the OK part) to them? We could then point them to there by linking it from notification and otrs templates ...
- There is definitely a trend of professional photographers to request
credits under the image in articles. This is what they are accustomed to. I (and a few others) think that we should make efforts to sensibilise our users to this. We can definitely afford to credit people in articles. This is a small concession which costs us very little and can benefit us greatly.
As we already saw, this point is quite disputed. I'm going with Andrew here, who suggested to insert a link to the author when there's a chance of him getting an article. At German Wikipedia we currently do the same thing with painters.
On the other hand: Are readers really interested in all these details? I think the people interested in details will also click the picture to enlarge it. Then they will see the name of the photographer as well.
Either way I think we need to explain the circumstances to our contributors, which I just did: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3AFAQ&diff=993877...
I also liked the idea of changing the icon below the thunbnails. Maybe the i-thing or localised text would really be better, but I'm afraid that's a question for the devs ...
Best regards,
Flo