[WikiEN-l] Crediting images inside the article text

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 12/21/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> I noticed that some people add credits of photos inside the articles,
> saying that CC-BY requires attribution.
>
> Shouldn't photo credits be allowed *only* in the image description page?
>
> I don't see why images would have a special status when compared to text
> contributions, the credits for which are found also a click away, in the
> edit history.
>
> AFAIK, there's no policy disallowing photo credits, but there should
> be one clear policy to discourage that -- it would also be a place
> to point people when asking about that. :-)
>
> (I'm not referring to photos by famous photographers who have their
> own articles, but to photos uploaded by users or found on Flickr)

It is unfair to provide inline attribution for images when we don't
provide it for text. (And certantly we could provide it for text..
Most articles don't have many authors, and if it were done by hand as
the image attribution is being done, it could be placed at the bottom
of the article)

Furthermore it's tacky and distracting... and I'd argue that if we do
it for some then we can be required to do it by all (since all the
free content licenses require attribution in a consistent and fair
method which is consistent with the standard in the medium, for wiki
that used to be on a second page). If we're required to do it by all
we're going to end up being forced to reject more uploads by
OffensiveUserNameN, and we're going to have a a world of hurt
extracting the data from the free form image pages.

I've long advocated that we create a second talk namespace for the
main NS called "Credits". There, interested editors could add their
name if they wish to be credited. Images could be credited there as
well.