[Commons-l] Making damn sure image attribution is very clear

[geni]

On 8/25/07, James Duncan Davidson <james at duncandavidson.com> wrote:
> 2) I'd really appreciate consideration of changing the policy of not
> attributing third party photographs where they are displayed. There are many
> reasons for this, but primary is that it's an accepted practice to credit
> photographs with the photograph itself.

Nyet. Plenty of books put the credit at the end. How many books have
the credit for the cover art on the cover?

>As well, the Creative Commons
> attribution restriction does state that the attribution be given in a manner
> reasonable to the medium and the means.

The medium is wikis the means is mediawiki. Click through is the
reasonable manner in this case.

> By crediting in a manner that is
> accepted and practiced in the photographic industry,

We are not part of the photographic industry. More relevant examples
would be Encarta and Britannica online. Or just general websites.

> it helps in a small way
> to let photographers know if the CC-license their material, it'll be used in
> a way that respects their wishes.

We have no way to know what the photographer's wishes are.

> Placing that data one click away is not
> obvious to users and doesn't feel "right" from the perspective of a
> copyright holder.

Allowing blatent violations of :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles

does not feel right to a wikipedian.

As well as the spaming issue is becomes problematical in cases like
this where there are three seperate authors to consider:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Caisson_lockenglish.svg#Description

> 3) EXIF metadata should be preserved, even on resized images. Thumbnails can
> be recreated, so junking those isn't an issue. But stripping unrecoverable
> information, especially that which may contain author and license
> information, is a problem when the images are borrowed and used downstream.
> I wish I had a good way to strip just thumbnails, but I don't currently know
> of one. Flickr has the same practice as well, and it's annoying....

This would require someone to rewrite the code. In understand that
mediawiki uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageMagick to resize
images.


-- 
geni