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As in books, we always have the copyright information in the image caption or at the end of the book and thus a signature in the image would produce redundancy in page layout and be unfair compared to the article author's credit.
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Personal tags impede reusing our images, for example in collages and books.The same applies to images, for the same reason that it is crucial for neutrality. We don't tag our Wikipedia articles prominently with our names in the text of the article, the better to step behind the work and let it speak for itself.Foobar, May 2005, CC-BY-SA" should not be written directly in the image but in Exif fields, which is also technically superior. Visible tags or watermarks inside images are strongly discouraged at Wikimedia Commons. It can be removed by reusers, but an active choice is usually required to do so. Thus, license information is always kept within the Exif of every image copy automatically. It is displayed by the MediaWiki software in the "Metadata" section at the image description page, and helps make this feature useful.Įxif information is especially helpful if you don't trust people downloading your media from Commons and reusing it according to your license conditions.
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Purpose for using Exif at Commons Įxif information helps us by keeping all kinds of meta information directly within the file, but it can never replace a good image description.
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