Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions

Others read the first paragraph and scan through the article's body for other interesting information, looking especially at pictures and captions.

If the image to be captioned is a painting, an editor can give context with the painter's wikilinked name, the title, and a date.

Photographs and other graphics need not have captions if they are "self-captioning" images (such as reproductions of album or book covers) or when they are unambiguous depictions of the subject of the article.

More than three lines of text in a caption may be distracting; instead, further information can be provided in the article body.

And remember that readers wanting full detail can click through to the image description page.

Because non-visual media imparts no visual information regarding the content of its file, it is often desirable to include a longer description than is typically acceptable with image captions.

For example, the statement: "'Yesterday' is one of the Beatles' best-known songs" might be more appropriate for the article body than the statement: "The string arrangement on 'Yesterday' utilises counterpoint, which complements McCartney's vocals by reinforcing the tonic", which might be more appropriate as an Ogg file description, especially if the text pertains to the contents of the media file or supports its fair-use rationale.

A substantial, full discussion of a technical image may be confined to the caption if it improves the structure of the prose in the main article.

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.

Several types of images warrant special treatment: Here are some details people might want to know about the picture (all are linkable): Keep in mind that not all this information needs to be included in the caption, since the image description page should offer more complete information about the picture.

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.