Forum:Thumbnails: Difference between revisions

:::I would disagree that captions ''always'' need to have a source, it depends on how they're worded. For instance, if your caption on, say, a character page is, "Nyssa and Tegan in the city of [[Castrovalva]]", do you ''really'' need to waste space by typing, "Nyssa and Tegan in the city of [[Castrovalva]] ([[DW]]: ''[[Castrovalva (TV story)|Castrovalva]]'')"? I think the answer is no. However, if you're on the [[Third Doctor]]'s page, and your caption is, "The Doctor faces off against the Daleks", you might need an attribution because the Third Doctor did that on more than one occasion. Of course, the far better solution is just to reword the caption so that it makes the source unmistakable — as in, "The Doctor faces off against the Daleks on [[Spiridon]]".

:::I also think there's a question of proximity. If your picture is illustrating a relatively short section, and the serial is linked in the body of the text, you risk running foul of [[Tardis:Manual of Style#Links]] by over-wikifying. There are some sections of some articles where the section only talks about one story. If you put a pic on that section, it's pretty redundant to cite the story in both the caption and the paragraph. Indeed, this is the case for many, many short articles. I don't think it's necessary to source the pics on [[Royal Leadworth Hospital]] (or any of the hospital pages) for instance.

:::Overall, I think it's far more important to link to other articles of interest than a story page. If you wikilink to a planet or alien or object or something that's clear in the picture, you'll get readers to go onto pages that don't get as much traffic as the story page. And that's what's important: keeping readers here a bit longer and channeling them to other pages.   I'd rather get one more click out of users too impatient to read the article, than to spoon-feed them the answer to the question, "Where does ''that'' come from?"  

:::Finally, I should point out that the MOS doesn't actually give us a specific format for captions, so anything I or the respondents above have said is a matter of opinion rather than actual wiki policy. We should probably therefore keep talking about it for a bit. '''[[User:CzechOut|<span style="background:blue;color:white">Czech</span><span style="background:red;color:white">Out</span>]]''' [[User talk:CzechOut|☎]] | [[Special:Contributions/CzechOut|<font size="+1">✍</font>]] 18:23, December 7, 2010 (UTC)