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(a)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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