[WikiEN-l] Attributing "attribution required" free images

[Steve Bennett]

On 10/30/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the most part the 1911 notice was useful for explaining why the
> article used arcane English and had an occasional racial slur...


It serves two purposes in one go. Nice, huh?


> And I prefer that we not create an easy way for people to advertise or
> self promote directly inside articles. I'd prefer that our
> encyclopedia articles not be littered with names, sometimes quite
> offensive or insulting names. I think it's utterly essential, legally
> and ethically, that we be as consistent as possible in our attribution


Crediting images in the same way as crediting text
is "utterly essential, legally and ethically"? No, that's a huge stretch.

I agree we don't necessarily want to open the door to "advertising", but
there surely safeguards we could put on that. IMHO we have already strayed
into a grey area with our rampant use of US military propag^H^H^H^H^H
photos.


> I am in favor of improving our 'one click away' attribution. I've
> advocated we create a credits tab multiple times.  There is clearly a
> lot that we can do to improve attribution without shoving it inline. I
> would not be opposed to including it appended to the bottom of the
> pages, as mediawiki does for text authors on Wikis that haven't
> disabled that feature.  Is there room to compromise here?


Hell yeah. Any of these would be fine, IMHO, for text:
- Box with names of prominent contributors
- Prominent link to "credits" or "authors" with clearly spelled out
list of main contributors (rather than the "history"
tab which is really for something else)

 For images:
- Name of author* shown in small print next to the caption
- Prominent link to an obvious "more information" type icon on the image
(like the example you made)

Slightly less good:
- List of contributors of images displayed somewhere on the page
- Contributors of images shown on same page as authors.

In either case we will need to actually store this metadata properly. I
don't think we have a reliable way of determining who the author is.


> The GFDL requires us to list *at least* the five main. We list all of
> them.  We're a little mixed up with the section naming, but we in
> terms of actual substance we are in full complaince. (except when
> people paste in stuff without attributing it, of course)
>
> *grumble* It's like asking someone for a one-page report and they point
you to a filing cabinet and tell you all the information is in there. Can
you tell from a history page who the five main contributors are? How long
will it take you to tell?

Steve
*Author - got a better term for the person who made an image, if it isn't
necessarily a photo?