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

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/26/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've done some more mockups in a similar vein here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thebainer/thumbtest
>
> These mockups are all achieved with wikitext (and a little HTML) but
> obviously something like this would be implemented by way of a
> MediaWiki message.

I really like these. I don't think you've quite hit the perfect
combination yet though, but you're close. Some thoughts:

- The copyright symbol is a good idea, as it screams out "This image
is not necessarily public domain"
- The little hand just adds clutter, and is confusing when you
actually have the mouse pointer over it
- The "i in a box" is good, but needs something more to make it
explicitly about the image.
- It should be obvious that the image can and should be clicked on.
- The (c) with the magnifying glass is sort of on the right track, but
really hard to see. Took me a while to realise that that's what it is.

Maybe a combination of the (C) and the (i) ? ("Copyright information"?
- or is that too cute?) A (C) with a small hypertext link saying
"credits"?

Note in any case that even clicking that link doesn't really solve
your problem: it's very hard to find the text that says "Photo taken
by sannse". We really need to rethink how we present that information,
so we have a single piece of text that says "This picture was taken by
Wikipedia user sannse. You can reuse this image as long as you
attribute her and follow [[these rules]]."

Steve