Baked-in references to images

[17jiangz1]

Are baked-in references to images necessary? Since as per COM:WATERMARK and COM:ENFORCE, visible watermarks are discouraged, and attribution/licensing information is instead supposed to be contained within metadata/file description page.

[videowikips]

Thanks for your comment. As you rightly mentioned, these are "references" and not "watermarks". Since a video is a collection of various other video/image files from Commons - two information is generally shared:

1. The author of the media file.
2. The License of the media file.

Additionally, these information is also added to the description in the Commons media file page.

Do you think adding the references for each media file redundant? Thoughts?

One of the reasons for the references is that the same pattern is followed when displaying an image/media content on the WMF Blog. See attachment for reference.

[17jiangz1]

Thanks for your prompt reply. Per COM:WATERMARK, the current approach of referencing seems to fall within the definition of a watermark:

A watermark is content embedded in a creative work that is not part of the creative work itself, and is used by the creator and/or copyright holder of the work to assert authorship and/or copyright, and to support the identification of unauthorised copying of their work.

With the approach used by the WMF Blog, the referencing is not visibly embedded into the media file itself. I think the current approach of embedding the references in the media file redundant and visually distracting, and such information should only belong in the file description page which is easily accessible to anyone who want the referencing information. With regards to on the authorship and licensing information for files derivative of multiple works, the current approach of referencing in the file description seems to be already sufficient, perhaps timestamps could be added for clarity.

Also with regards to compiling images with different licenses, license compatibility should also be taken into account (see Commons:Collages), although it could be argued that the videos are considered a collection, and not adaption of the source content, in which case the licensing would be independent of the source images (see Commons:Adaptation and Collection
).