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.