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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
[snip]
> I would be in favour of allowing some kind of attribution in the captions
> of photos.

This has come up may times before. There are a lot of points against it.

I'll summarize some of them:

* It would be wrong for us to widen the attribution gap between
photographers and text writers. We can't inline credit all text
authors because some articles have hundreds of authors. So inline
credit would provide discriminatory attribution.

* Some images also have a large number of authors, or authors with
long names. Some articles have many images, we have hundreds of
articles with over a hundred images. This gives images the same inline
attribution problem as text.

* So long as we allow non-human nameish names for users inline
attribution becomes an platform for non-removable POV insertion and
advertisement. SEOs have already noticed that they have much better
luck getting their links into wikipedia by submitting images. We'd
increase the effectiveness dramatically by moving it into articles.

* Even if it's not advertisement we have users with names like
"User:NoseNuggets"... if thats their preferred name for attribution it
would be a bullet in the head of the current professionalism of our
pages.

* Related to the above, we already have problems with users fighting
to keep their pictures of their pets in articles. We really don't want
the reasonable suspicion that people are trying to get their "name in
lights" hurting our ability to AGF.

Most importantly:
* There are simple actions we can take to improve attribution which
don't have these problems.

I've suggested several in the past that we provide a more obvious
attributions link, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/example

We could also adopt the popup-imagepage part of Lupin's Navigation
Popups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POPUPS), which might help
somewhat.

I've also suggested we create a "Credits" namespace as a second
associated namespace, like "Talk". The Credits namespace could provide
an editable place for interested authors to list themselves, the image
pages could be automatically displayed at the bottom page.














> If attributions would be included in the article itself,
> I think outside photographers would be more willing to license their
> work for inclusion in Wikipedia.
>
> At [[User:Eugene_van_der_Pijll/Image_attribution_test]], I've worked out
> some ideas of what this attribution would look like.
>
> Eugene
>
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