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Wikipedia:Captions |
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This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should follow it, except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article. Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus. |
A caption to an image on Wikipedia is a short description that appears below the image. Most captions are a few words mentioning something important about the image that is not obvious simply by looking at the image, such as its relevance to the text. For complex images or images whose relationship to the text is unclear, the caption can be one or two short sentences, rarely three. Writing good captions is difficult, and the examples below may be helpful. Along with the title, the lead, and section headings, captions are the most commonly read words in an article, so they should be succinct and informative.
Not every Wikipedia image needs a caption; some images are simply decorative. A very few may be genuinely self-explanatory. If you decide that an image does not need a caption, then please follow the advice at Wikipedia:Alternative text for images to specify appropriate "alt" text.
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There are several criteria for a good caption. A good caption
Different people read articles different ways. Some people start at the top and read each word until the end. Others read the first paragraph and scan through for other interesting information, looking especially at pictures and captions. For those readers, even if the information is adjacent in the text, they will not find it unless it is in the caption — but do not tell the whole story in the caption — use the caption to make the reader curious about the subject.
Another way of approaching the job: imagine you're giving a lecture based on the encyclopaedia article, and you are using the image to illustrate the lecture. What would you say while attention is on the image? What do you want your audience to notice in the image, and why? Corollary: if you have got nothing to say, then the image probably does not belong in the article.
One of a caption's primary purposes is to identify the subject of the picture. Make sure your caption does that, without leaving readers to wonder what the subject of the picture might be. Be as unambiguous as practical in identifying the subject. What the picture is is important, too. If the illustration is a painting, the painter's Wikilinked name, the title, and a date give context. The present location may be added in parentheses: (Louvre). Sometimes the date of the image is important: there is a difference between "King Arthur" and "King Arthur in a 19th-century watercolor". If the image of the painting is on the page for the artist's biography, wikilinking the artist's name is not needed. See below for more details. If the image depicts the subject of the article, it need not be wikilinked. For instance, if the article is about J. D. Salinger and the image depicts him, his name should not be linked.
Though succinctness is not the same as brevity, it is easy to write a caption too long. Even more than with all good writing, any superfluous word that can be removed from a caption increases its power. More than three lines of text in a caption may be distracting. Sometimes increasing the pixel width of the image brings better balance (but remember that you should not normally force image widths): more often, superfluous words can be removed from the caption instead. Save some information for the image description page, and put other information in the article itself, but make sure the reader does not miss the essentials in the picture.
A good caption explains why a picture belongs in an article. "The 1965 Ford Mustang introduced the whiz-bang super-speeder" tells us why it is worth the trouble to show a photo of a 1965 Ford Mustang rather than just any of that model car. "It was the only one I could find with a suitable license" probably is not a worthy caption reason. Links to relevant sections within the article may help draw the reader in (see here for how to do this): compare Ebola for an example.
A picture captures only one moment in time. What happened before and after? What happened outside the frame? For The Last Supper, "Jesus dines with his disciples" tells something, but add "on the eve of his crucifixion" and it tells much more about the significance. Add "With this meal, Jesus established the tradition of Holy Communion" to get more context if you do not cover that in the article. In such a caption the name of the painter and date provide information on the cultural point-of-view of the particular representation.
The caption should lead the reader into the article. For example, in History of the Peerage, a caption for Image:William I of England.jpg might say "William of Normandy overthrew the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, bringing a new style of government." Then the reader gets curious about that new form of government and reads text to learn what it is.
Several types of images warrant special treatment:
Here are some details people might want to know about the picture (all are linkable):
Usually less significant are:
Keep in mind that not all of this information needs to be included in the caption, since the image description page should offer more complete information about the picture. If it does not, it may be possible to add it there from WP:RS such as the website of the owning museum.
Unless relevant to the subject, do not credit the image author or copyright holder in the article. It is assumed that this is not necessary to fulfill attribution requirements of the GFDL or Creative Commons licenses as long as the appropriate credit is on the image description page.
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