Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Could it be done in the ALT tag? It seems to me that there is a mismatch between those who want attribution to be readily available, and what people actually want when they click on the image. I think if people actually want to know who created the image, it's pretty easy to find out. But honestly, have you ever wondered who made an image that you clicked on somewhere on the web? Why would you care?
I do not believe an alt tag would be sufficient.
We frequently receive requests from commercial publishers for image copyright information, even with how easily it is currently provided.
It's publicly available. They can ask if they are unsure or doesn't trust on wikis. What's the problem?
On *articles* I believe our behavior is ideal in almost all cases
because we do exactly what is expected: we provide an enlarged copy of the image. Most commercial news sites have the same behavior.
We have a good system for images but we also wanna images for other things! Would be better a JS popup saying "What did you want? a) See the article b) See the image" ??
As far as I can tell, the problem is limited to the main page and
potentially the portals. Do you agree?
I disagree. It's only going to be used there but it could be used anywhere. We must be aware of that.
We can't require people to 'go out of their way to look for it'. We need to provided attribution in roughly the same manner as we do for the articles, and we need to make it reasonably accessible.
Is really people going to care? They often say "uploaded from english wikipedia X" and X is an article!! Having one or two steps won't be a difference for them. They're used to right-click and catch. Those who care will find it easy :)
There are people who argue that our current behavior is insufficient and whom want an inline byline. But providing one runs the risk of just creating a greater mess (article authors don't get inline bylines, multiple editor images, and the requirements to provide historical data on GFDLed images). Hiding it further is just not going to fly.
Magnus' suggestion would actually be the most visible, especially if the attribution information was displayed directly on the page.
Australia (You clicked on [Australian flag.svg], created by Jim Smith) Australia is a great country... etc. The real problem is that we don't actually have attribution data in a readily packaged form.
Should read 'one of the problems with that proposal'. :) What we currently do is fine, there is no great need to have an easily machine readable copyright holder with our current framework.
That's not the system. I was talking about a link *to the real image page*. It's like articles when disambiguation is on "title (disambiguation)". It makes no sense showing "image by John", when John only added a transparent background of an image uploaded by Mike. And it doesn't make sens showing "image by Mike" because he uploaded it from X wikipedia. An on that wikipedia it was uploaded from Susan, who got it from the NASA webpage an so it's on the public domain :D