[Commons-l] Musing with professional photographers: further lessons learned

[Florian Straub]

Rama Rama <ramaneko at gmail.com> wrote on wed, 23 jan 2008 10:32:11 +0100 
and since it has been such a long time I decided to use some kind of 
full quote :)

> Yesterday, I exchanged a few e-mails with a professional photographer to 
> confirm the licencing status of some of his work on Commons. I 
> discovered someone willing to confirm the licence, but evidently quite 
> disgruntled by his experience of Commons. Two lessons can be learned 
> from what I read:
> 
> 1) We are victims of a paradox which forces us to be especially annoying 
> with the most precious of our occasional contributors.
> A significant proportion of the high-quality photographs of celebrities 
> uploaded on Commons are copyvios. This forces us to be especially 
> strident with copyright issues towards well-meant photographers. Short 
> of the most courteous civility, repeated requests amount to downright 
> harassment, and may appear to question the word of the uploader.
> I don't have a magic formula to break the paradox itself, but we should 
> make efforts to sensibilise our users:
> DO:
> * be extremely polite
> * apologise for bothering people with seemingly superfluous paperwork
> * apologise for seemingly doubting their word
> * offer to help and advise personally if the user needs anything 
> Commons-related
> * formulise the request in such a way that a simple "OK" from the user 
> is sufficient. Open-ended questions are creepy ("what next, my credit 
> card number ?") and bothering ("how many bleeding mails will I have to 
> send before they are content with what I gave them ?").
> DON'T:
> * assume that the user knows all of our rules. We are there to guide them.
> * assume that the user is aware of problems that we encounter as Commons 
> administrators (typically, that most photographs that look like his are 
> copyvios).

What about a page or section on a page explaining all this stuff (except 
the OK part) to them? We could then point them to there by linking it 
from notification and otrs templates ...


> 2) There is definitely a trend of professional photographers to request 
> credits under the image in articles. This is what they are accustomed to.
> I (and a few others) think that we should make efforts to sensibilise 
> our users to this. We can definitely afford to credit people in 
> articles. This is a small concession which costs us very little and can 
> benefit us greatly.

As we already saw, this point is quite disputed. I'm going with Andrew 
here, who suggested to insert a link to the author when there's a chance 
of him getting an article. At German Wikipedia we currently do the same 
thing with painters.

On the other hand: Are readers really interested in all these details? I 
think the people interested in details will also click the picture to 
enlarge it. Then they will see the name of the photographer as well.

Either way I think we need to explain the circumstances to our 
contributors, which I just did: 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3AFAQ&diff=9938777&oldid=9523525


I also liked the idea of changing the icon below the thunbnails. Maybe 
the i-thing or localised text would really be better, but I'm afraid 
that's a question for the devs ...

Best regards,

Flo

-- 
Flo's movie quiz:
The lord tells me,
he can get me out of this match,
but he's pretty sure: You're fucked!