Last modified: 2012-07-26 05:55:36 UTC
There is a huge list of possible metadata associated with files. Most usually, only a small fraction is actually used in a file. The metadate labels are usually too short, and too ambiguous, to serve to explain what fields exactly are meant or used for. MediaWiki users to a broad extent cannot be assumed to understand them, leave alone being familiar enough with them to know by heart what's behind them. Thus, listing the metadata is of little use to non-expert users, and may misguide them. For very many metadata fields, there exist good descriptive or even quasi normative web pages. Many of those are mentioned in the message documentation associated with field labels, such as MediaWiki:Exif-scenecode/qqq I believe, it would be both helpful and educating to have such links associated with metadata field labels, either by making them links themselves, or, imho better, by placing a small link next to them, similar to a footnote link, but opening a new tab or window directly. So, this is what I suggest.
Hmm, interesting. Some fields are pretty self-explanatory - I assume most people should know what Image Description means. However there are many that aren't, the scenecode example you mention is a very good one. (In the ideal world we would translate scenecodes into human readable labels, but there's a lot of them, and they really aren't used very often, making it not really worth the effort) As for the actual links, I think linking to a help namespace page on mediawiki wiki would be best. We don't want to dump users to the actual standards, which are honestly not to clear.
(In reply to comment #1) > As for the actual links, I think linking to a help namespace page on mediawiki > wiki would be best. We don't want to dump users to the actual standards, which > are honestly not to clear. I've raised this for discussion at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#exif_descriptions
