I understand you're problem, and I understand you are not talking about what I'm talking about. I am talking about free icons, the ICONS that are used as, well, icons - look up icons on the very 'wikipedia' we're discussing; they are meant to represent something. When you click the 'harddrive' icon on you're computer, you expect to open you're harddrive, not view information about the harddrive icon. I don't think that normal images should use this feature, or perhaps even have the option - maybe we need a new Icon: namespace just for free-domain-released icons like the crystal ones, that can be substituted, and LINKED WITH. I don't care what license the icons in the crystal pack have, and I'm sure no users do either - they just want to get to their destination. I know you would get pissed if you're beautiful picture or drawing of X were just passed on by, without any attribution - fine. That sort of thing shouldn't be linked ever for any reason that I see - I'm talking about images BUILT for the PURPOSE of acting as an ICON representing and pointing to something else. Right?
On May 15, 2006, at 8:58 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 5/15/06, Elliott F. Cable ecable@avxw.com wrote:
Reply from me, I BELIEVE I have a O.K. solution to this that we can all agree with.
There are already a multitude of 'tags' that go on the image tag, such as making it a thumb, the pixel width, an alt tag, things like that - why not add a 'link tag'? If you supply, say, [[Image:Chicago_icon|48px|:Chicago]] - then the image Image:Chicago_icon would appear, liked to [[Chicago]]. To parse it, just catch any line starting with a colon (just prefix main-namespace links in this format with a single colon, as you do for transclusion). Does anybody see the logic in this? And, for links of this format, do something similar to the redirect - put a notice where redirects go that this image pointed you *here*, go *HERE* instead for information about this image.
I find the redirect notice notion highly distasteful. Any other site with a behavior like that would get a takedown notice from me explaining that the attribution was effectively hidden.
A small 'image credit' or 'image details' link below (or in an adjustable position) would, however, be acceptable.
Also, perhaps put the attribution in the alt-tag for images so linked
- we could make attribution a separate field on the upload screen -
that would also even help with the proposed upload-to-commons thing!
Alt text will goof up people using screen readers because they expect the alt text to be an alternative to the image (i.e. a description of the image) as per the HTML standards. In the past it has also been suggested that the longdesc attribute be set to the image page, but no browsers that I'm aware of make longdesc available in any case.
Even if not the attribution thing, I really think a link-to option would really simplify things for users.
Yes it would be useful. So lets figure out how to make something that everyone will find acceptable.
For a little more fodder for the discussion is that several of the non-english wikipedias (fr for their portals icons and de for their featured article image) already fail to provide attribution for a few their free images on their main page. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l