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