Last modified: 2014-06-26 22:02:02 UTC
It looks like dates are being displayed in the lightbox as "Created on XX/XX/XXXX". The "Created on" will make sense for most user-generated photos, but the date field is not universally used to mean creation date. It could legitimately mean publication date, or broadcast date, or digitization date, or it could even refer to the date of the subject depicted. There should be less specific language for displaying the date.
Thanks for reporting! Do you have any suggestions? We display either the date from the information template or (if not present) the file upload date, so we need some sort of qualifier to differentiate between the two.
Thanks for pointing this out, Dominic! Are you sure that the 'date' field of the 'Information' template of the description is used inconsistently? I thought that field was clearly intended as the creation date in the upload wizard. If that's the case, then I think the 'Created by' label is fine. If that's not the case, it would be possible for us to just say 'Date', but it's not ideal. Gergo,if we are using different types of dates in the same place, I think we should change the label to clearly indicate what users are seeing: 'Created by' or 'Uploaded by'. Otherwise, this will lead to confusion. When we do the structured data upgrade with Wikidata this summer, we will need two separate fields to address this issue: 'Creation date' should never be mixed in with 'Upload date', IMHO, it would be better to leave it blank. We may even want to consider a third field for file edits or overwrites: 'Modification date'.
It's not so much inconsistency as variability of meaning. The concept of "creation" doesn't apply equally to all media or types of works. And there is inherent uncertainty when you make a derivative, like a crop: is it the creation of the derivative or the original that is put in the date? I know that the documentation for the "Information" template on Commons does instruct users to put in when the original source was created (whatever that means), but some other relevant points are that (1) the name of the parameter and the visible output of the field is only labeled "Date", and many users likely reach their own conclusion about what that means, and it is incongruent to use a more specific label downstream, (2) where the creation date is unfilled or unknown, the upload date is commonly put in that field anyway (even instructed by the template documentation), so there is no way of telling which is meant, and (3) not all of the machine-readable templates agree with Information about using "date" for "creation date". For example, {{book}} on Commons recommends "publication" date (which would be different from either the writing or the digitization in some cases). Links to template documentation for reference: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Book
(In reply to comment #2) > Gergo,if we are using different types of dates in the same place, I think we > should change the label to clearly indicate what users are seeing: 'Created > by' or 'Uploaded by'. Otherwise, this will lead to confusion. That is what we do currently (and that's why a label like 'Date' could be confusing). > When we do the structured data upgrade with Wikidata this summer, we will > need two separate fields to address this issue: 'Creation date' should > never be mixed in with 'Upload date', IMHO, it would be better to leave > it blank. We may even want to consider a third field for file edits or > overwrites: 'Modification date'. Wikidata has some pretty flexible ways of handling this, like statement qualifiers. We just need to get there somehow :)
I think we may need to postpone this until A) The Information template gets fixed or B) Wikidata goes live on Commons. Either way I don't think we can do anything about it for now - dropping priority.
Sort-of fixed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/138212/
