Wiki Images: Rights & Attribution

As Camera-wiki.org expands on the work of the old Camerapedia, we’ve been trying to improve the clarity and consistency of photo credits.

Camera-wiki does not host its own images; almost all are linked from the Flickr photo-sharing service. Flickr permits and even encourages this, but their terms of service say, “web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.” Already, virtually every image in the wiki properly clicks through to the photographer’s own Flickr page.

Camera-wiki has its own Flickr photo pool. When people submit their copyrighted photos to this pool, we understand this as granting permission for the photo to be used by article editors in the pages of Camera-wiki.org. Unlike the wiki text, which is published under “copyleft” (GDFL 1.3), contributors’ photos may still retain “All Rights Reserved” copyright status. Or some photos may have Creative Commons licensing which forbids commercial re-use or derivative works. (These issues are discussed at more length in the wiki page Adding Images.)

We are trying to make all of this more explicit, with an “image rights” link included under each photo, to discourage misuse of contributors’ photos. We also want to note the name of people who were nice enough to contribute their images to Camera-wiki (and of course Creative Commons licensed images require that).

For the sake of ease and consistency, we’re encouraging all our article editors to use the Flickr Image Template when adding images. It still requires a bit of cutting and pasting, to add the image page URL (we ask you use the URL form http://www.flickr.com/photos/alf_sigaro/464292899/in/pool-camerawiki) and the correct-sized image file (under Flickr’s “Grab the HTML/BBCode” menu choice, select the img src=URL that looks like http://farm1.static.flickr.com/232/464292899_0a2384c965.jpg ) —but the result should look approximately like this:

Retinette II B by alf sigaro

Kodak Retinette II B
image by alf sigaro (image rights)

But please understand—there are something like 10,000 photos in the wiki, so this is not something we can achieve everywhere overnight. In some cases, the layout of pages would need to be redone to add caption text.

We’d be grateful for any volunteer editors who would like to help update attributions and image rights—and perhaps check our Flickr pool for newer, clearer photos at the same time. Thanks!

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A Small Hiccup

This morning, a bit of routine maintenance at our web host caused the short form of our wiki URLs to stop working. That is, when you tried to visit http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Main_Page you may have gotten 404’d.

In fact the “ugly” format URL’s like http://camera-wiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page continued to work and we didn’t actually go away.

Our tech guru steevithak has checked into the problem; and the short-form URLs should work fine from here forward.

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Camera-wiki.org is Alive!

Hello!

Once Upon a Time, there was a free public encyclopedia of camera information called Camerapedia.org. But through some unfortunate shenanigans, this was redirected to an advertising-supported, for-profit service hosted by Wikia.

A couple of (minor) contributors who found this troubling decided to invite the community to begin a new non-commercial alternative… Anyway, long story short, now Camera-wiki.org is alive—continuing the dream of an open, community-supported reference site for cameras and photography. Camera-wiki.org is the true successor to Camerapedia, welcoming the many editors and contributors who built up that site from nothing. In just the first two weeks, hundreds of contributors and thousands of images were added to our Flickr group.

We’re very happy if you’d care to contribute your images of photo gear to our Flickr pool. And if you’re familiar with how wiki editing works, please create a login and help Camera-wiki.org grow and improve. We pledge to stay purely non-commercial for as long as community support makes this possible; and a future goal is to establish official nonprofit status.

The GFDL licensing of the old Camerapedia’s text makes it possible to “fork” the site into a new project such as this. Also, we have been working diligently to re-confirm permissions to use the images embedded in the pages in the new Camera-wiki.org.

We’ll be posting more updates here as the project evolves.

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