A couple things for community consideration:
In-article media crediting systemI have made a what I think is a user-friendly system of crediting media providers within image captions within articles. It has several features worth pointing out particularly:
--It follows Creative Commons Best Practices,
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Image#Mark_as_a_caption--Each credit line states the license family/copyright status
--It accounts for those instances when credit lines are unspecified, in cases of some public domain images and as the Creative Commons family of licenses requires upon author request
--Credit lines are consistent throughout all articles in which the image appears. The data is kept on a subpage of each image
The system is viewable at
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Media_Credit_Lines_within_Articles along with examples.
Documentation and verification systemThe in-article media crediting system system goes along with a new proposed documentation and verification system, see
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Template:Image_notes4 and
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Template:Verified_image. The image documentation template has several features worth pointing out particularly:
--It provides for a very high standard of standardized documentation, unparalleled among wiki projects
--It produces the code to place the image you just uploaded into articles! Just copy the code and paste it into your article!
--It provides a link to place the credit line (click the "M" - M is for
metadata)
--It contains various links for help or additional info
--It exhibits a proposal for "Verified images" by "specialists" of the proposed Media Assets Workgroup, see the section "Status of data". This is important for several reasons: 1) Some images initially uploaded under open licenses later do not indicate they are at their source; but, when such images were acquired when under such a license they may nonetheless be used in perpetuity under that license. Verification states that the image
at the time of verification really was as the data states, even if the data later changes at the image source. 2) It provides a layer of confidence to CZ users and re-users of our media content, in essence saying that someone with specialist-level knowledge has checked an image's data and it pans out
For two examples where the proposed new documentation and verification system is used see:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Image:U2_Live_in_Toronto_2005_%283%29.jpghttp://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Image:Amesservants.jpgThe documentation and verification systems provide basis for what I call
library science meeting a wiki. That coupled with the in-article crediting system provides basis to build a very high quality depository of media: one that high quality media contributors are drawn to contribute to (and a great many of the better ones do avoid the Wikimedia Commons), and that re-users are drawn to and can trust.
If we wish to improve upon the WP and WM Commons model as regards media--both of which are riddled with the same basic problems as the WP text--this is the direction to take.
Thoughts?
