Help talk:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Formatting and illustrating articles/Adding images

Image attribution

This discussion started on SCHolar44's talk page. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 21:26, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi Clive,

I saw your feedback on Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Formatting and Illustrating Articles/Adding Images, which prompted me to make a few improvements to the page. Notably, I have added two new boxes: Attribution and the Author field and What about attribution?.

I hope this was the sort of thing you were looking for; if not, please let me know. If you have any other ideas for improving the page, feel free to edit the page yourself, put a note on the talk page or leave further feedback.

Thanks for your feedback! – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 20:47, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, PTG!

Both changes are really good. The Attribution and the Author field addition gives really useful advice.

Taking that forward now, let's imagine a situation in which someone wants to use a Wikimedia Commons image provided by someone else. The photographer wants his/her name attributed, plus the fact that they have granted a CC-BY-3.0 licence. Maybe, therefore, the wording could be something as in my new sentence (at the end):

"If you chose a license that requires re-users of the image to give attribution to its creator, then the Author field is important: it tells people who they should credit for the image. For your own work, Author is already filled in with your user name, so you don't need to change it. If someone else has given you permission to upload their work, you'll need to put their name here instead. You can also add the Creative Commons or other licence that the image owner has stipulated for the image's use: for example, Photographer Name CC-BY-3.0.

What do you think?

Cheers. Clive H.

SCHolar44 (talk) 07:42, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

The licence is normally selected using the Licensing drop-down, rather than including it in the Author field. The Licensing drop-down is beneath the large "Summary" box (see Figure 15-3 on the page). Step 3 under "Uploading an Image to the Commons" explains how to select a license.

For your example, you would select "It is from somewhere else" at step 2 of those instructions, then select "Attribution 3.0" from the Licensing drop-down at step 3. You would put "Photographer Name" in the Author field at step 8.

I realised there is one important extra step when uploading someone else's work, which wasn't mentioned on the page: e-mailing a copy of the permission from the author to OTRS. I have added an extra box that mentions this. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 21:29, 17 October 2012 (UTC)