Allow transclusion of text in template "Information", parameter "Description" on Wikimedia Commons to [[File:name.jpg|thumb|<caption - to be transcluded over here>]] on Wikipedias.
{{Information
|Description = <text to be transcluded>
}}Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
This is a bad semantic connection that you are making I think. Defining a default caption is a possibility, but it definitely should NOT be the image description (which can be hundreds of words at times). The description is a very bad default caption (where one describes, the other summarizes). If such a feature would ever be implemented, there would more likely be a separate "default caption" property added somewhere. There is also the issue of multiple languages of the different wikipedias adding complexity and most languages would never have a default caption for most images probably. (Last assessment based on the fact that most images currently only have English descriptions)
Next to that, a default caption in the eyes of many is a bad idea in the first place, because a caption should be relevant to not only the image, but also towards the text that is surrounding the image. Many images are used many times for different purposes, and to do that with a single caption is bad article writing. Making a careful assessment about what you put into a caption on every single usage of an image, will eventually lead to better written articles I think.
Many people who have suggested this feature in the past on village pumps etc, see it as something that would save time. In my personal view, it is doubtful wether it actually would save time in the grand scheme of things (wikipedias in a couple of hundred languages), but also, I fear that the quality of the captions inside the articles will worsen because of the feature.
Having said that, there are specific use cases that might benefit by doing this in a slightly different way perhaps. I'm thinking about the Image insertion dialogs/wizards for instance. But it could be difficult to implement that without running into the same pitfalls as detailed above .......
Related are bug 29202, bug 19906.
Removing bug 4547 dependency. For the long term interwiki transclusion should not be (ab)used for this purpose. If this feature request is implemented, it should certainly not be done that way. Moreover because the {{Information}} template is *not* part of the MediaWiki software.
When the multimedia projects get more attention again, and meta-data is finally stored in the database and moved out of templates, this can simply become a parser function (e.g. {{#file:12345135|description}}). The repository interface takes care of the interface to the database or (locally cached) API modules.
See also [[mw:License integration]]
Moved to MediaWiki because this should be possible also for wikis using InstantCommons for instance.