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

[Andrew Gray]

On 29/10/2007, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
> Andrew Gray schreef:
> > I think the fact that we *ourselves* make a point of being discreet
> > about attribution makes it more reasonable for us to go with #1 - as a
> > photographer, I would feel short-changed if the authors were
> > prominently credited but I wasn't, whilst I wouldn't feel offended at
> > being relegated to the small print on p.350 if the authors themselves
> > were in the small print on p.348.
> >
> > Does that latter distinction make sense?
>
> Not really, 99% of our text is written by Wikipedians, who have no
> expectation to be prominently attributed; we have taken many of our best
> pictures from outsiders, many of whom expect more prominent credit to be
> given.

For what it's worth, that was from the point of view of
me-as-an-outsider, not me-as-a-contributor, seeing someone reuse my
material. I would feel silly to find that I was assumed to need a
higher degree of attribution than the main author, and I can't believe
I'm abnormally self-effacing.

> They don't care about, and haven't ever explicitly agreed to
> Wikipedia's internal rules on attribution.

If we require people to care about and explicitly (implicitly?) agree
to Wikipedia's practices on attribution (which are, after all, liable
to change over time), one wonders why we allow the incorporation of
free licensed material at all, or what the point of these licenses in
the first place was!

I'm not saying that I don't care what the photographers think, but I
don't think we're being unreasonable here.

This isn't an "and attribute me prominently in the following way"
license, it's an "and attribute me" license. We can go too far in
disrupting the way *our* project works in order to accomodate the
hypothetical views of a "silent minority" of contributors - all of
whom have chosen to release material under a copyleft license that
does allow what we're doing.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk