On 10/30/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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?