Wikidata:Property proposal/alt tag

Alternative text

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Not done

Description	A text alternative of the displayed image
Represents	alt attribute (Q1067764)
Data type	Monolingual text
Template parameter	"alt" in most infoboxes
Domain	Qualifier of image (P18), logo image (P154) and other image-specific properties
Example	Earth (Q2) → image (P18) → "The Blue Marble photograph of Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 mission. The Arabian peninsula, Africa and Madagascar lie in the upper half of the disc, whereas Antarctica is at the bottom."

Motivation

Alt tags in their most basic form describe what is shown in an image - they are the equivalent of media legend (P2096) except they say what the image contains rather than what it displays. They are essential for people using a screen reader (Q1328864) to access a page, and as such they are a fundamental part of using images in Wikidata-driven infoboxes. This concept was previously discussed at Wikidata:Property proposal/text alt, and the main arguments against it were "but it depends on context" (which it does a bit, but not as much as media legend (P2096) does - and having some description is much better than no description!) and "Commons isn't ready yet" (which is fine, but we need this *now* in infoboxes, and we can migrate it over to Structured Commons later if needed). As such, I think this needs rediscussing. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 00:24, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Comment@Mike Peel: What is the difference between this and media legend (P2096)?Thank you David (talk) 16:41, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
  • @ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2: They are two different things. The media legend provides a caption for the image, the alt tag describes what is in the image. So in the example I gave above, the second sentence would not appear in the media caption, but can in the alt tag. If you couldn't see an image (e.g., it doesn't load, or you're using a screen reader), often the captions aren't sufficient to understand what the image would have shown - that's where an alt tag steps in. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 16:58, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
•  Support I don't buy the "depends on context" argument - a good "alt" tag is intended to provide a textual description of an image; it may be a thousand words, but it should describe the image sufficiently that a person who cannot see the image would understand what was in it, no matter whether the whole or just a part of the image was relevant in a given context. ArthurPSmith (talk) 01:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
•  Oppose, again. Ambiguous, context dependent, subjective, unstructured data which is different for every language. --Yair rand (talk) 22:02, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

  @Yair rand: In the same way as media legend (P2096) is? We have a number of other examples where your statement could apply (e.g., aliases, descriptions), I can't see why we can have those and not this, particularly given the accessibility benefits of alt tags. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

• @Mike Peel: I was looking at your example case to think about it some more - is your intention to use this as a qualifier on a image (P18) statement? If so there would always be a context - in the example case the image is a representation of the Earth, not some part of it or the Apollo missions, or whatever else it might be used for. If the intention is rather to somehow attach this property directly to the image, then I don't think we are able to do that anyway right now, as images (from Commons at least) do not have wikidata items. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:54, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

  @ArthurPSmith: Yes, I was only expecting this would be useful as a qualifier for P18 (and other image-specific properties, e.g. logo image (P154)), and personally I'm only interested in using it for alt tags in infoboxes. I'm not proprosing that we start having Wikidata items solely for images! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

•  Oppose My main concern the last time was that nobody wanted to invest the time to look at how the property is labeled/described elsewhere to make a case of how we should name it. Naming it "Alternative text" which clearly violates our naming conventions by starting with a capital letter suggest to me that little thought went into the creation of this proposal. I'm willing to change my opinion if someone actually looks at prior art and makes the case that a specific name is the best one.ChristianKl (✉) 19:40, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
• closing as  Not done as discussion has stalled with no consensus for creation. − Pintoch (talk) 11:04, 20 February 2018 (UTC)