On 10/30/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Question: why should we give special prominence and mention of the original author to a carefully composed, lovingly shot photo whose license requires attribution to the author(s), and not give special prominence and mention of the original author to a carefully composed, lovingly written article/text whose license requires attribution to the author(s)?
The main difference is that the author composed their text *for* Wikipedia, so we have no doubt that they're happy with the lack of attribution. However, if we're copying an image from Flickr, we just don't know - the intent behind labelling something as "CC-SA with attribution" is pretty unclear.
In any case, there's no good reason we *don't* attribute authors better. And in fact we don't really comply with the GFDL from this point of view: there should be a clear list of the five main contributors.
I've noticed people seem to hold photos and text to very different
standards. For example, I don't think I've once seen anyone remove chunks of quoted text for being 'excessive fair use', and yet similar actions and rationale for images are too common for me to need to belabor the point.
It's a lot more effort to take a photo.
Steve