Hi all, As you are probably aware, enabling reuse is an important part of Wikimedia Commons' mission. We do this for humans by clearly indicating licenses and author information (that's the theory, anyway :)). But we also need to do it for machines, because it is machines that allow reuse of our material on a much larger scale, e.g. by libraries, museums, and other archives. Currently the data we provide for machines in quite poor. Although it is quite easy for a human to look and see that {{GFDL}} is a license template, for machines it is much harder because there is no "standard" that says which templates represent licenses and which represent other things. Figuring out who the author is, for attribution purposes, is also often difficult (is it the uploader? what if someone uploaded a slightly edited version?). As an example, PediaPress would like to use this information, for their printed wiki-books, to put the licenses of the images. At the moment there is literally no way they could do this reliably without having a human do it for every single image. Anyway, it is my strong belief that for Wikimedia Commons to be more successful and more useful, we need a way of encoding this kind of information in a machine-readable format. There are a number of different approaches one could take, but I think it is better if we just ask the developers for any extension/feature which will do this job, and let them figure out which is most appropriate. If you agree, please sign <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Request_for_extension_to_provide_metadata_support> and indicate your support for helping Wikimedia Commons material reach a wider audience. ***Community support is a necessary condition to get a feature like this enabled.*** So please speak up if you want to support this idea, by signing the page. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Request_for_extension_to_provide_metadata_support> thanks! Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/