Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Multimedia and Commons/Make MediaViewer actually show all authors, instead of just the first one

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Make MediaViewer actually show all authors, instead of just the first one

  • Problem: Media Viewer cannot handle attributions properly, and can, in relatively simple and common circumstances, only show one of several authors of an image. This can lead to copyvio on the WMF's part.

    Commons uses c:Template:Creator templates to make attributing authors easier. They'll provide a Wikidata link, and provide the birth and death years of the author. The problem triggers in any situation where there's multiple authors and at least one has a "Creator" template, which is not particularly uncommon. Media Viewer searches for the first creator template, and strips all other text. It can't even gracefully handle situations with multiple "Creator" templates: It will only return the first, and ignores the rest. However, ironically, if no creator templates are used, it's perfectly capable of just returning the entire Author/Artist field.

    This seems to be treated as an edge case, but it really isn't. Lithographs can easily have three main authors (c:File:Edward Duncan - The Explosion of the United States Steam Frigate Missouri - Original.tiff, and collaborative works aren't that rare, say, c:File:Humanité René Philastre and Charles-Antoine Cambon - Set design for the second part of Victor Hugo's Les Burgraves, première production - Original.jpg. One could also easily get this situation in a photograph of a sculpture or any other 3D work, any collage, etc.

    While the WMF can say (and has said) that the file description page is the only true place for someone to get file info, I've seen sites link back to a MediaViewer on a Wikipedia page as their source (Cracked magazine used to do that a lot, for instance). Given a CC-licensed image with more than one author, Media Viewer's failure could either set our reusers up for a lawsuit, or set the WMF up for one.

    Quite frankly, after 9 years of being aware of this (see Phabricator bug report), it feels like a basic attribution bug in what's being used as a key software component should have been fixed long ago.

  • Proposed solution: Fix MediaViewer to better handle such things; or, if it can't be fixed readily, provide a failstate for when it's not sure. For instance, "See file description page for details" is a valid choice in the face of the programming not being sure, and certainly better than inaccuracy.
  • Who would benefit: Creators, reusers, and arguably, it could save the WMF from a lawsuit if a Creative Commons license is misattributed because of the faulty software
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T68606 - this is 9 years old.
  • Proposer: Adam Cuerden (talk) 17:52, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • It's not so much that we considered it as an edge case, but as a case where the Commons community needs to figure out how to represent multiple authors in a machine-readable way. (Back when MediaViewer still had official maintainers, anyway. These days, I don't think there is anyone considering it at all.) Authorship metadata is maintained by the community, and developers have very little influence over how it happens. --Tgr (talk) 03:17, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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