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

[Steve Bennett]

On 10/30/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This one is easiest.  Let consensus behind a style, then I'll work out
> the details and make sure we get it implemented.


Ok. Having said that I'm off on holidays for the next week, maybe
someone else can start the process?
Drop a note at the village pump, maybe centralised discussion and somewhere
else? Plus an explicit message here...

Commons has the data source side of this nearly covered with
> information template.
>
> Basically some kind of magic word would be added to the mediawiki
> markup that indicates the surrounded post-transclusion text should be
> copied out into a separate column in the database. Since commons
> already has structured data for authorship, once the software is done
> this would require only a few template changes.


Presumably something like {{author:...}} along the lines of
{{defaultsort:...}} ? Then
you're saying we just update the relevant template to markup that field
specially. Cool. We're assuming that raw text is a good enough
representation for authorship...maybe it would be better to be more explicit
like "attributiontext" or "authorname" or something, to leave open the
possibility for more details later on like contact information etc.

What do we do on Enwp?  ... I'm thinking that an effort to move all
> free images to commons would actually take no more work than trying to
> fixup the descriptions on enwp.


Not sure. For some reason the Commons people are openly hostile to the
idea of a mass import of free media to
Commons. And in any case the attribution mechanism will be useful for fair
use images. I suggest we leave
this as a problem for en people to solve in their own time - as long as the
mechanism works, they can get around to rolling it out whenever they want.

> - [[Image:]] tags should ideally show author
> > and licence information in a tooltip.
>
> This is an utterly trivial software change (on the order of a few
> minutes) after the data is extracted and available in the database.


A MediaWiki software change? Also when you say "utterly trivial" do you mean
that you can yourself
perform it and get it committed? Out of curiosity, what's the normal lead
time from a new feature going into
the repository, and it appearing at en.wp ?


>
> If we ignore text it's like the above, but ignoring text is ignoring
> the elephant in the room.


Sure. There's an elephant and a rhino in the room. I'm happy to deal
with just the rhino
for the moment.


> I fear that this last one is complicated and significant enough of a
> change that its dead on arrivial, but it's the only way that I think
> we could stand to seriously improve our text attribution. :(
>
> It is indeed a hard problem. Let's stick with rhino hunting.

Steve