On 10/30/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)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