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

[K P]

On 8/24/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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> > 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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> >
>
But all text is under one license.  The problem isn't about
attributing the photographer, the problem is about the numerous
different licenses for images.  As this is the case for images only,
the solution is to include THE LICENSE, not the photographer, under
the image caption.

Of course, the licenses, except for PD are generally not
understandable by mere mortals for images, and one common ones appears
not to apply to images at all, but that's another story.

KP