On 5/15/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Not just GFDL. Most free content licenses require attribution to be provided.
We've previous received complaints from copyright holders when their CC-BY-SA-2.0 content was copied from commons to en (for protection) without attribution data.
Most licenses require us to provide adequate attribution in a manner which is standard for our format. It would be highly inadvisable to make attribution on the main page less accessible (causing copyright complaints from people over those) or more accessible (providing basis for complaints elsewhere in the Wiki).
I believe the the Mangus Manske suggestion would make attribution data far too obscured.
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?
So, it makes sense that the information is available to anyone who goes out of their way to look for it - but I don't see the value in forcing it down people's throats, when they're actually trying to get more information on a topic, and aren't per se interested in the image.
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. On many images, there are actually several authors (due to touch ups etc). And there's no obvious way of working out mechanically who actually "created" the image.
Steve