[WikiEN-l] [Commons-l] Musing with professional photographers: further lessons learned

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 23, 2008 6:43 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> We can't promise that, and on en:wp it's general practice not to.
> *However*, where possible I like to credit the photographer in the
> caption anyway - particularly if they're a professional. (I like
> detailed captions in general - place, date, photographer.)
>
> Many do get very stroppy about a lack of caption credit especially if
> it's CC-by - even if we're within the letter of the licence by only
> having the credit on the image page, it's IMO not only polite but
> often *useful to the reader* to note who took the picture.

Here we are again ...   And again I find myself saying that it's not
useful to have articles slathered with names promoting people thought.
 It creates inappropriate motivations for contributions (already
spammers submit images to list their companies on the image pages),
and unfair credit.  No one wants to see the vanity edit warring that
happens between images on articles further fulled by the use of an
image also resulting in your name at the top of the most widely
visited webpage for a subject.

But these concerns are not in conflict with providing *good* credit:
We could provide a credits tab, a more obvious expand icon, or any one
of a dozen other improvements.

We've talked about some of these before. Where are they?