

Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos  - timwiseman
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html?_r=1

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mquander
In the linked article, whenever they mention a person with a particularly poor
Wikipedia photo, they have a hyperlink. When I saw this, I thought, "how
progressive for them to link to all the photos so I can see what they're
talking about!"

Of course, they don't actually link to the Wikipedia photos, or even the
Wikipedia page. They link to the near-useless, generic NY Times "more content
about this" page for that name.

I guess it was never a mystery why people started leaving newspapers for
blogs, was it?

~~~
cruise02
Not to mention that there are seven pictures of Halle Berry (still not enough)
on her Wikipedia page, when they criticize one bad photo as if it were the
only one there.

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tokenadult
"A few celebrities, like Plácido Domingo and Oliver Stone, have had the
foresight to provide their own freely licensed photographs. And considering
the money that stars spend to maintain their image, it is surprising that more
have not invested in high-quality, freely licensed photographs for Wikipedia
and other sites. Perhaps they don’t recognize how popular Wikipedia is. In
June, for example, Ms. Berry’s article had more than 180,000 page views."

There we have it. If the subjects of the photographs care about how they look
on a very widely viewed website, they will see to it that a good-looking photo
with the appropriate license is submitted to Wikipedia. If some of the current
photos are really, really bad, the photograph that would improve the status
quo could be taken by almost anyone. For more image-conscious celebrities,
they will still want to hire a photographer with experience and good
equipment, but all it takes is a contract (freedom of contract is a wonderful
thing) that the photograph will be licensed in the way that Wikipedia desires,
and the photograph can go to Wikipedia.

~~~
cdr
See other comments here and elsewhere - deletionists are a major problem on
wikipedia, and especially so when it comes to photos. The photo problem really
is mostly a wikipedia problem.

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timwiseman
I thought this article was rather interesting especially this line:

 _Also, it can be difficult to persuade a talent photographer to go along with
that approach_ [of supplying a CC licensed photo] _because one free photograph
can drive out all the others,..._

I would think it would be relatively easy to hire a talent photographer to
explicitly take a series of photos to be released under creative commons.

Even if for some reason many of the traditional talent photographers refused,
if they were so keen on getting a better photo for use on wikipedia it seems
like it would be easy to hire talented amateurs or lower tier professional
photographers that would love the exposure that would come with having it used
for wikipedia, even if they had to lose control over it to get that.

~~~
RK
Try getting the copyright to wedding (or similar) photos.

If the photographer doesn't flat-out refuse, that will be be an extra x%
charge (somewhere around 50-100%) to make up for the lost gouge they normally
charge for "reprints".

And even though one photographer might hire another under "work for hire"
terms (i.e. the second photographer holds no copyright to the photos they
personally take). Don't expect that you can hire the photographer to work
under those terms directly for you at the same rate.

~~~
timwiseman
Yes, almost all professional photographers are reluctant to relinquish their
copyrights and will as you say "be an extra x% charge". But if these people,
who literally make their living on their appearance and reputation, are
serious then they should be happy to pay that extra money.

If they are unwilling or unable to do that but still care about their picture
on wikipedia, then they can certainly get a talented amateur to do it for a
very reasonable fee. It (probably) will not be as good a professional
photographer, but it will be better than what wikipedia likely has now and
will be cheaper even with relinquishing copyright.

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biohacker42
The NY Times should have its links link to what they are talking about, not
the NYT's own pages about that subject. This is glaringly bad design when what
they are talking about is a web page.

Actually I shouldn't blame this on design, this is someone's "strategy" for
more add revenue.

~~~
wmf
There's even a name for it: black hole SEO.

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lsb
It's a desert of photos, but being able to see a 70 megapixel Currier & Ives
engraving of your home town circa 1879
([http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Currier_&_Ives_Br...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Currier_&_Ives_Brooklyn.jpg))
is absolutely amazing.

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sfphotoarts
I have found that photos on WikiPedia are almost impossible to make 'stick' -
someone who has no idea comes in and deletes them. I submitted some supporting
and with license granted to CC around an artist bio and someone who had only
ever contributed articles about Dr Who deemed them unworthy and deleted them.

~~~
liquidben
I had a similar experience that alienated me to contributing. (Geeky
confession) I posted a comic book cover to an article about a derivative
character of a comic book character. The usage of a comic book cover for
demonstrative purposes was covered in their hard-coded fair use Q&A for
posting images. A few months later, a page was created as a blanket article
about all alternate versions of said character. The article I'd donated to was
excerpted to that page, along with the image.

So what happened? The image was deleted from Wiki because the fair use notice
wasn't updated to explain how the image's use on the new page was covered.

I was notified about this before it was deleted, and replied to the person who
set it in motion, asking them why a redundant disclaimer was necessary for an
excerpt. In return I got a link to the fair use page. I thought about deleting
the image link with the excerpt. I thought about copy/pasting the original
fair use text so it was in there twice. I thought about punching that guy.

Instead, I quit editing articles at WikiPedia. Just wasn't worth the
frustration. I'll fix spelling occasionally, but that's it.

~~~
pwmanagerdied
Too true. I was never a huge editor, but I did a decent bit here and there,
but also quit after having to deal with bullshit like this all of the time.

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zacgarrett
When working for my former boss I uploaded a photo of him that I had
permission from the photographer to do anything I wanted with it. I didn't
check the exact right boxes when uploading the photo and it was removed. I
tried again, no luck. After about 5 times of trying to put this photo I gave
up. It was not worth my time to even bother adding this high quality photo to
wikipedia.

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lacker
Yet another one of a long stream of articles from the NYTimes insulting
Wikipedia. They should add a "Disclaimer: we consider free information online
to be a competitor, and hope it fails" to these sort of article.

~~~
timwiseman
But this one was insulting. It clearly portrayed the facts with limited
judgment. At least as I read it, it made the "prominent personalities" that
did not supply properly licensed photos as the source of the issue, if it is a
real issue.

At least as I understood it, it was quite neutral to wikipedia itself.

~~~
timwiseman
Sorry, I had a major typo. I meant to say: "But this one was NOT insulting."

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philwelch
At Wikipedia, copyleft license fundamentalists rule the roost. We used to have
fairly liberal "fair-use" policies about having photos, but that viewpoint
lost out.

For similar reasons, all the audio content on Wikipedia is Ogg Vorbis.

