Oh, this is the issue of where restorers get credit? It should be indisputable that restorers get credit, the issue is where to display that. The common situations are:

1) Photographer is Joe Bloggs - appears on image page 2) Photographer is famous and has article - gets mentioned in caption on article page 3) Image is famous and has article - that gets mentioned in caption on article page 4) Image produced by object (e.g. satellite) or agency with an article - some mention made

In the above, when I say "article page", I mean anything front-facing to the public (including main page and featured picture pages).

Point 4 covers things like NASA picture of astronauts, USGS pictures of volcanoes, and pictures from the Library of Congress and so on (including other musuems, libraries and other archival institutions). It is courteous to mention large institutions like that in image credits on article pages. In the case of telescope images, we usually have an article on the telescope (be it in space or on the ground), so it is informative to tell the reader about the origin of the picture and how it was produced (sometimes there is not room to say that fully in the caption).

In other words, it is meta-data (about how the picture was produced and changed and cared for and transmitted from point of origin to the screen), but if informative, it can be put in the caption. If not, then maybe not so much. For restorers, I would say that the image page is where they should be named, but the image caption could maybe say: "restored by Wikipedia/Wikimedia volunteer" - that is the key point, making clear to people that volunteers (some very professional) are doing these restorations, and that they should be applauded for this (but not more prominently than Joe Bloggs taking a photograph), and thay *you* can also volunteer to help in this way.

The bits in tension are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Picture_of_the_day/Guidelines

Credit (optional): "The credit for the image. If the image was a collaboration, add the name of everyone who worked on it. If it's a Wikipedian and they don't have a user page, link to their talk page instead. We usually do not have off-site links to photographers' web pages (on Flickr, for example). Even if the author is unknown, say so. This can be left out if the creator is called out within the blurb itself."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Captions#Credits

"Unless relevant to the subject, do not credit the image author or copyright holder in the article. It is assumed that this is not necessary to fulfill attribution requirements of the GFDL or Creative Commons licenses as long as the appropriate credit is on the image description page. If the artist or photographer is independently notable, though, then a wikilink to the artist's biography may be appropriate."

Though the former applies to a very narrow area (the POTD section of the Main Page), and the latter applies to all articles across the entire encyclopedia, so there is some flexibility for slightly different approaches if that will encourage volunteers to do more work (what needs to be avoided is people giving strong opinions without being really involved in the work being done, opinions that result in volunteers getting de-motivated and less work being done).

Carcharoth

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Angus McLellan angusmclellan@gmail.com wrote:

It's strange the things you never really see until your bogosity alarm goes off.

I only registered that we give an image credit for the featured picture on the main page because of the "author" name appearing next to today's image. Leaving aside the cognitive dissonance episode that made me notice this why are we doing it at all? I can understand that the caption must say that Ogata Gekkō painted the image, firstly because we have an article on him and secondly it'd be stupid not to say so. But anyone else involved is mentioned on the image page. This is thought to be good enough for non-featured pictures contributed by editors. And even that is far more than authors and copyright holders of non-free images might get - usually just a link to the website the uploader restole ^Wdownloaded it from.

[[Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day/Guidelines]] and the associated templates could do with some rethinking.

Angus McLellan

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