Commons:Credit line

Credit line or attribution line holds information that author of the work requests all users to include with the work, as a condition of use enforced by the license. Specifically widely used Creative Commons CC-BY licenses and GFDL licenses require all users of the work to attribute the author.

Although the term "credit line" is used here, the required attribution need not be specified as a credit line, neither is the format of the attribution specified.

Some works might have specific instructions from the author on how he would like his work to be attributed. Those requests must be honored, as long as they fall within what is required by the license, and should be honored, if reasonable, otherwise. In case author did not gave explicit instructions, he still needs to be attributed and the minimal and suggested forms of attribution can be found below.

Credit lines required by license

Creative Commons

CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses

According to Creative Commons CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses reusers must attribute the work by providing a credit line. Section 5b of full license provides the details. Included below are the most relevant fragments:

If You Distribute [] the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made [not to], keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:

• (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;
• (ii) the title of the Work if supplied;
• (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work;

In other words, unless author or licensor asks not to be credited, reusers distributing files found at Wikimedia Commons must provide credit line with license and author. Also author might request for credit line to include: other "Attribution Parties" (like Wikimedia Commons), URI (like web pages), or title. Reusers can choose format of the credit line "reasonable to the medium or means" as long as all required components are present. Example Credit lines in minimal format:

License	Author	Source	Credit line	Notes
{{cc-by-sa-3.0}}	John Doe	Own work	John Doe / CC-BY-SA-3.0	Minimum information required by the license for files without explicit Credit line field specified the by the author
{{self|cc-by-sa-3.0|GFDL}}	John Doe	Own work	© John Doe / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL	Example credit line for dual license file with Wikimedia Commons as extra "Attribution Party"
{{cc-by-sa-3.0}}	User:Example	Own work	© User:Example / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0	Example credit line for users who do not provide their real names.
{{cc-by-sa-3.0}}	John Doe	Own work	© John Doe / http://external.website.com / CC-BY-SA-3.0	Example credit line with external website specified by the author.
{{cc-by-2.5}}	John Doe	Own work	Marble Lady by John Doe / CC-BY-2.5	Example credit line with title specified by the author.

CC-SA licenses

CC-PD licenses

CC Licenses not requiring attributions: {{Cc-zero}}

GNU Licenses

License	Author	Source	Credit line	Notes
{{self|cc-by-sa-3.0|GFDL}} {{GFDL|migration=relicense}}	John Doe	Own work	© John Doe / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
{{GFDL}} only (now called {{GFDL|migration=opt-out}}) {{GFDL-1.2}}	John Doe	Own work	Copyright (c) John Doe. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". .	You also have to include full text of the license.

Courtesy credit lines

Public Domain media do not require credit line or any kind of attribution; however, reusers are encouraged to attribute author (if known) and inform users that the work was released into public domain. Below are suggested formats for the reusers

License	Author	Source	Credit line
{{PD-self}} {{PD-author}} {{PD-heirs}}	John Doe	Own work	John Doe / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
{{PD-old}}	John Doe	publication / self-scanned	John Doe / Public Domain
{{PD-self}}	[[user:JohnDoe]]	Own work	user:JohnDoe / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
{{anonymous-EU}} {{PD-anon-1923}} {{anonymous work}}	anonymous	publication	Public Domain

See also

• Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia
• {{credit line}} - template to add credit line to your images
• Commons:Copyright tags
• MediaWiki talk:Stockphoto.js - script for automatically creating credit line code
• Many license templates, line {{self}} or {{Cc-by-sa-3.0}} have "attribution" parameters to specify desired form of attribution