Marco Krohn wrote:
In many situations, like the above for example, it could be a typical win-win scenario. We could offer adding a "generously donated by foo" text to the image and would get a free image in return.
This I think might be a good idea: to start an informal policy that we credit image authors in the caption (in the article where the image is used, not just on the image description page), perhaps in small-font or something, and perhaps eventually automatically-generated from the not-yet-extant "author" field for the image. We can't require that our distributors keep this (we don't want GFDL invariant sections), but simply having it be unofficial Wikipedia policy that *we'll* keep it should satisfy a lot of people, since we're the most prominent Wikipedia distributor. And I'd bet many people would consider having a photo credit in a Wikipedia article at least something of a payment. Plus it's actually useful information for our readers in many cases (as with, say, "photo courtesy of [[NASA]]").
-Mark