[WikiEN-l] Crediting images inside the article text

Thu Dec 21 18:54:19 UTC 2006

On 21/12/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>
> I noticed that some people add credits of photos inside the articles,
> saying that CC-BY requires attribution.
>
> Shouldn't photo credits be allowed *only* in the image description page?
>
> I don't see why images would have a special status when compared to text
> contributions, the credits for which are found also a click away, in the
> edit history.
>
> AFAIK, there's no policy disallowing photo credits, but there should
> be one clear policy to discourage that -- it would also be a place
> to point people when asking about that. :-)
>
> (I'm not referring to photos by famous photographers who have their
> own articles, but to photos uploaded by users or found on Flickr)
>
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Of course there should be some method of attributing major authors inline
(incidentally, as far as copyright goes, those making minor edits which
don't substantially change the content, aren't creating a "new work", so we
would only need to credit major authors). This would be work, but it's not
particularly acceptable to be lazy with regard to copyright just because
content is licensed under a free/open licence. Besides, having such inline
attribution would make reuse of Wikipedia content a lot less awkward and
more legally sound, e.g. for print.

As far as I can see, Wikipedia as an entity is a serial copyright infringer,
even of content licensed under GFDL. It's all a bit of a house of cards -
and eventually the project will be caught out by some litigious contributor.

Zoney

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