Hello,
As you may have noticed, Roan, Krinkle and me have started to more tightly integrate image licensing within MediaWiki. Our aim is to create a system where it should be easy to obtain the basic copyright information of an image in a machine readable format, as well as querying images with a certain copyright state (all images copyrighted by User:XY, all images licensed CC-BY-SA, etc)
At this moment we only intend to store author and license information, but nothing stops us from expanding this in the future.
We have put some information in a not so structured way at mw.org [1]. There are some issues open on the talk page [2]. Input is of course welcome, both here or preferably at the talk page.
Bryan
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Files_and_licenses_concept
Has there been consideration given to translating author names into different languages?
Relative to other types of metadata, having the author in different languages is not as important, since most people just use whatever the name in the author's native language is (or at least, that is what experience suggests to me). However, we might want to have different translations of the authors names in some circumstances: *If the author is 'Unknown' or 'Anonymous', we'd definitely want to be able to translate that. *If the author is a company, government or a group with a proper name, people tend to translate the name. *If the author's native language is in a different script then the current language, then the author's name is usually translated in my experience. (Since to the average English viewer, a name in a language like Arabic or Tamil that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, generally look like any other name in that language I imagine people who only speak Arabic would have trouble differentiating between the written form of different English names). (Of course, the above is just a guess for one you'd want to translate author names, I don't know what happens in actual practise). So I do think allowing such author properties to have multiple translations is something to consider.
If there was support for translations of the values of these properties, ideally when querying this information from the api - we'd want to be able to do things like get the author's name in language X, falling back to the original language if unavailable. Get the author's name in all available languages, etc.
-bawolff