Rationale behind using the first caption as the file title

[sivaraam]

From the pages I could find about "File captions", which are:

• Commons:File captions - Wikimedia Commons
• Help:File captions - MediaWiki

I don't see it mentioned anywhere that the caption are a substitute for the file title. I only see the following mentioned in Commons:File captions:

How is this different from descriptions?

• Captions are meant to be simple and short. While descriptions can be very expansive, captions are limited to 255 characters in length, cannot contain markup (like Wikitext links or HTML) and do not support external links.
• Captions are available as part of our structured data, while descriptions are not. In technical terms, a description is plain wikitext wrapped in a language template, wrapped again in an Information template ; while captions are Wikibase labels. As such, they will be searchable through the API, making it easy to find/filter/pull captions from files as metadata.

In many cases, the caption will be similar or identical to the description (or even the file title!). For example, File:Fire station Hallstatt - October 2017 - 02.jpg has the English caption "Hallstatt fire station in October 2017".

Conversely, on Pluto-01 Stern 03 Pluto Color TXT.jpg there is a very extensive description (858 characters, and links) and the caption is much shorter (more or less the same caption used on the Wikipedia articles using that image).

From what I understand captions are treated independently from the file title in Commons. I see that #3503 removed the title but I don't see any reason mentioned there. So, I have some questions related to this change:

• Why did we end up deciding that captions should replace the file title?
• Is it even right to do that (squashing two possibly unrelated things into one)?
• What if someone wants to upload an image with a title that is different from the caption? It's valid case. The Commons website allows that. What's the point in restricting it?

It would nice if someone shed some light about these. Correct me if I missed something.

[sivaraam]

This seems to have fallen through the cracks. So, pinging some people for input:

@nicolas-raoul @macgills @misaochan

[nicolas-raoul]

Any caption is by definition a good title.
There is no reason to ask users to input more text, especially on mobile.

What if someone wants to upload an image with a title that is different from the caption?

There is no reason anyone would want to do that (except some kind of meaningless habit). I am sure the "title" will be removed from the Upload wizard soon, it is just very slow to move as usual.

[sivaraam]

There is no reason to ask users to input more text, especially on mobile.

Except maybe for the reason that someone intentionally wants to do that (entering both title and caption) for some reason that we are not aware of.

There is no reason anyone would want to do that (except some kind of meaningless habit). I am sure the "title" will be removed from the Upload wizard soon, it is just very slow to move as usual.

It's well and good if it gets removed. To be honest, I personally don't have any reasons to enter both a title and a caption. The problem is, as of now Commons has Title and Caption separately. As long as it does, it's best if we have them as separate inputs rather than giving the users the opinion that we're forcing them to use their Caption as the Title of the image. You know what makes it worse, as of now the app doesn't even mention that the Caption would be used as the title, anywhere. Not even in the info dialog.

I think it's best if we don't make premature decisions that significantly deviate from the web upload flow. It might easily lead someone to misinterpret our intentions which in turn might lead to bad PR. We should at the bare minimum allow users to enter a Title optionally, if they prefer. If we do have a "really strong reference" that says that Captions and Titles would be the same thing in the future, we might not need that change. I'm not sure if such a thing exists. Even in that case, we should clearly communicate that the Caption would used as the Title. This is not clear at all now.

[misaochan]

I am on board with modifying the caption tooltip to inform the user that it would be used as the title.