Last modified: 2014-03-25 20:03:44 UTC
By convention, existing files should not be modified significantly by reuploading, so we should show the first uploader (or do something more comples, like a list or a "more" link - but if we only show a single name, first uploader is more important information).
https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/238
Apparently this is not so easy as it seems: the imageinfo API has a revision limit parameter (iilimit) which can be used to get information about the uploader of the first revision, but there is no way to start from the earliest revision, so we would have to start from the first. Most information would be duplicated for each revision (especially metadata can be huge), making this very inefficient: one either has to make an API call for most image information and a separate one for the first uploader, or get everything for every revision, possibly getting dozens of kilobytes of text in response. The first uploader seems like an obvious thing to look for, we should incorporate easy access to it into one of the APIs (maybe CommonsMetadata, which is somewhat of a catch-all already).
