https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65445

Erik Moeller <[email protected]> changed:

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--- Comment #5 from Erik Moeller <[email protected]> ---
Hi all,

The {{Credit line}} template is problematic in three important ways:

1) It repeats information in an error-prone manner. Author, license and source
are typically repeated and need to be maintained in two places. The result is
that many {{Credit line}} invocations are actually incorrect or problematic.
Here's an example call:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WojciechowscyAttribution&action=edit

As you can see, some CC licenses are linked, others aren't and the GFDL link
goes to the Wikipedia article about the GFDL. This is very typical. The
template attempts to substitute license names magically with links through some
error prone code where a missing character will cause a license URL to be
omitted.

2) In many, probably most, invocations, it adds no new information. Media
Viewer already provides attribution both using the author name and source URL.
Typically this results in a virtually identical credit line (both below the
image and using the "Use this file" dialog). So the actual severity of this
issue is being dramatically exaggerated.

3) The template, in its current form, emits all its text as a single
machine-readable string. In order to display it in a manner similar to other
attribution info (i.e. license in one place, author in another), the
machine-readable output would need to be modified.

It's not clear to us that the template in its current form should exist or
should be supported. To the extent that uploaders want to provide custom
attribution strings beyond source URL and author, there may be better ways to
do this, so that information like license name and author name is not
duplicated in two places.

At minimum, we would need to address 3) - we could then ignore the problematic
license string in favor to Media Viewer's own license parsing code, and
substitute author/source information with the attribution string in the
template. However, we think this would be a cop-out -- we should find a way to
solve this problem that minimizes information repetition.

None of these issues are specific to Media Viewer; they will impact all
re-users of Wikimedia content. (For example, any re-user would be including
error-prone licensing information by relying on "credit line" attribution
strings which sometimes link to the actual license and sometimes not.)

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