User:Martsniez/attribute

Portrait of Pakubuwono X, wearing the uniform of a KNIL major-general

The Philco Predicta, 1958. In the collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Research has shown that the greatest fear that cultural heritage institutions have for sharing their content with Wikimedia is a loss of attribution. Institutions have put a lot of time of curating, collecting, digitizing and restoring cultural content before sharing it in analogue and digital form. They fear that once they have shared their data and files that they will no longer be seen as the curator and experts of that data. This inhibits the great process we see in collaboration with these GLAM institutions.

I would like to propose/discuss a way to give back to these institutions by giving proper attribution within Wikipedia articles. On the right side of this page you will see an image of Pakubuwono X donated by the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

Theoretical Justification

Attribute where attribution is due

From a third person perspective Wikipedia is a different platform than wikimedia commons. From that perspective it would be logical, even required to have attribution name and license information available in every use of that photo

Citation needed

it is strange that images are not placed with the same scrutiny as other sources. Images should be considered as having the same value other sources in a Wikipedia article. We only know that the images used in this page are Pakubuwono X because an authority claims that he is in this image. This fact checking should be added into the Wikipedia article.

Practical Implementation

• Use a bot to list possible images that can be attributed and where this is useful.
• Use this list to add attribution manually.

Use a reference

Using a reference gives the opportunity to add additional source text to an image. Where you can state that this is an image by an authoritative institution.