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Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad
Reservoir Hill writes "The NY Times has an article investigating why, unlike the articles on Wikipedia which in theory are improved, fact checked, footnoted, and generally enhanced over time, the photos that go with Wikipedia articles are so bad and in many cases there is no photo at all for even well known public figures. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto on Wikipedia because Wikipedia runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited. 'Representatives or publicists will contact us' horrified at the photographs on the site, says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. 'They will say: "I have this image. I want you to use this image." But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.' Recent photographs on Wikipedia are almost exclusively the work of amateurs who don't mind giving away their work. 'Amateur may be too kind a word; their photos tend to be the work of fans who happen to have a camera,' opines the Times's author. Ultimately the issue for professional photographers who might want to donate their work is copyright. 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
Wikipedia does not have to increase its popularity, it has no online free rivals. It is the people who have a wikipedia page that will be willing to have such a nice picture than all American presidents who will provide copyleft pictures. If we can get RIAA-sponsored stars to interest themselves about these pesky legal issues, this is a great benefit.
And if you really need a picture or are ready to (sigh) "steal" an image with a copyright, there is always Google Image, the greatest aggregator of ready-to-be-pirated copyrighted material.
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Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available. What more is there to say?
They want to use wikipedia as a advertisement for their portfolio while still using a restrictive license for everyone else. This is a problem, of course, for the encyclopedia that aims to be free for anyone to copy, distrubute, modify as they please.
> 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
Um, they do. If he can't even understand a basic thing such as copyright, then why is he writing such an article? The whole article stinks.
The nytimes seems to be complaining that the photos of celebrities are ordinary photos, rather than 'glamour shots' (their words). I fail to see the problem.
It goes on to say that photographs are static and can't be improved, thus exposing a flaw in the wikipedia model. Wtf? You can just replace a photograph with a better. And I have even seen a given photo re-uploaded when someone else found a better version (like the NASA photos).
But surely the photographers DO maintain the copyright, they just license the image freely. If they have a problem with 'freedom', they should just say that instead. "We photographers don't like freedom". There, I restated the problem, clearly.
If some celeb has a problem with their picture, they can just pay for one to be CCd. Don't tell me in a world of millions of photographers, they're all asshats?
"I want the free publicity I get from having my images freely distributable, but I want to retain the sole right to distribute it."
Not how it works.
To me, the problem is the professional photographers' restrictions on public re-use of their work. If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site then they'd release the image under an appropriate open license.
ps: i have no idea what "elevate the image on the site" means either. but if someone as smart enough to be a celebrity photographer says it, it must mean something really clever and important.
If I'm not entirely mistaken, the photographer maintains the copyright, but the publishing on wikipedia under the creative commons allows everybody to use the photography as long as the photographer is credited.
If photographers want to help, but are worried they'll lose control, why not upload lower than mint quality images?
testing 1 2 3
You can't mix those and Wikipedia admins knows that. It's like matter and anti-matter. Allowing copyrighted content would spawn all sorts of problems. You would no longer be able to fully cite, print or publish Wiki content easily. If the page would contain copyrighted image, you would have to ask for pardon the copyright holder etc. Headache after headache..
And to think I was looking for a 4000x3000 raw bitmap photo of Halle Berry on Wikipedia. Good thing I now know better.
Seriously though, what's wrong with the diversity that the net has to offer? I use wikipedia.org to get some shallow information about anything that crosses my mind, and I use images.google.com to browse for images. So wikipedia is not the source for everything, big deal, I have the rest of the internet at my disposal at any time. So thank you wikipedia, thank you google, and fuck you NY Times.
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Wikipedia provides full citations for the author/source of all uploaded photos. If a professional photographer wanted to increase his exposure (no pun intended), he could contribute to wikipedia under a free license. The upsides really dwarf the downsides.
-Gonz
'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'
Then you better be sure to stay off Wikipedia, Mr. Avenaim.
He just fails to understand the concept of Wikipedia, whereas everyone should be able to copy-paste a whole article, -with- the photos included, if deemed necesary.
I couldn't care less if a picture of a celebrity is not up-to-date, glamorous, or whatever: As long as the provided information is correct. And -if- the celebrity (or their management) cares... Well, supply a freaking photo with a Creative Commons license: Is this so hard?
Mr. Avenaim would just love it to keep the copyright over his work, so probably in the future he could ask for some money for using his work.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
See, NYT, it's not called a web because we like to imagine spiders crawling all over our internets. It's called that because pages are supposed to be joined into an interconnected mesh through hyperlinks. So, when your article on the bad photos on Wikipedia doesn't include a single link to the bad photos themselves, or to any page on wikipedia at all (I've checked, "wikipedia.org" doesn't occur even once in the page source), the impression you're giving is not "we're a respectable news organization", it's "we fail at the internet forever, kick us."
he editors and reporters at the New York Times are constantly hectoring us on various subjects, in their editorials as well as their news stories. Sometimes the subject is climate change, which requires a sophisticated knowledge of mathematics to evaluate competing theories. Or maybe it's health care, where the paper's editors denounce the rest of us for being reluctant to commit to trillions of dollars worth of government medicine. The implicit premise of the Times' yammering is that they are smarter than you.
The problem is, it isn't true. Reporters and editors at our major newspapers are neither smarter nor more knowledgeable than the general public. In fact, I think they are, in general, less so. Today's case in point is a correction that the New York Times has run repeatedly in recent years. Yet, somehow, they never seem to learn:
I say this in all seriousness: why should we take direction on any complex issue of public policy from a group of people who literally do not know what a square foot is? They are not smarter than we are. They are dumber.
If you are a celebrity and want Wikipedia to have a good photo of you, provide one with the appropriate license and stop bitching. Problem solved! If you can't provide a picture under a free license, don't complain when someone else puts up a crappy picture. There is no problem here.
meh
Sounds like a problem with your workplace rather than with Wikipedia.
meh
If Wikipedia has changed their terms and are allowing cc-*-nc-* licensing, then I'll be very happy to stand corrected. If they still require licensing of all uses including commercial ones then I'm sorry, but I simply can't play that game.
They can't. One of the stated goals of the project is to allow commercial reproductions (e.g. distributions on CDROM or printed copies). To permit restriction of photographs to non-commercial uses would cripple this, effectively preventing them from reaching a key aim point. They'd rather not have the photo (which encourages somebody else -- perhaps somebody who already has that commercial use permit -- to take the photo for them) than have one that can't be used properly.
So as I understand it from the article, the problem is this:
So it seems to me that
Exactly. Many seem to think this is a "oh boy, those annoying freedom fighters that prioritize freedom over practicality again", but really... In *every* case where a non-free license would be used, Wikipedia would not be able to use the images and let people download them freely without breaking the law. And with a high profile site as Wikipedia, believe me, someone in the sue-happy country the English Wikipedia is based in, would try and win. (if not having this policy)
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And I have no problem understanding the copyright laws, certainly those relevant to Europe. I possess about 250,000 negatives which are my copyright (although not all of them are worth a dime). I know that Wikipedia is a community resource where we are neither intended to make money or achieve fame or infamy. So the NYT article is just dumb. If celebs want images in wikipedia then they should upload a completely copyright free image and stop whining. That's all there is to it. Not complicated. No script writer needed. They do it every other day when they appear on the beach for the paparazzi.
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I do agree it would _change_ Wikipedia's core free-ness, and I myself am not sure how it'd work out - I like it that Wikipedia is free (libre) and remixable. But then I like good photographs too (aargh! it's almost like non-free drivers on Linux!).
> With your modification it would be, "We're collaborating on
> this work. You can browse the premium edition here, or you
> can take a copy of the second class edition to do whatever you like".
What I'll say to that is, there's no reason libre content has to be second-class. If an illustration meets a quality bar, include it (that's what editors are for, and wikipedia has many of them). If it doesn't, try to use an image licensed to *.wikipedia.org. It would also be trivial to implement a user pref to preferentially show libre images always.
The key point is, you said "we're collaborating on this work". While this is true for _text_ on wikipedia, images (and sound files, etc) are typically _not_ collaborated upon - one typically replaces the other. Which is why I believe a separate licensing scheme that allows licensed multimedia content (but doesn't prefer it) can work, provided the community agrees.
Go somewhere random
Interesting that the NY Times would press the idea that Wikipedia has "bad photos".
It wouldn't have anything to do with the NYT being nervous about losing their status as the "official record", would it? After all, it's only been about a decade that the NY Times has had color photographs at all.
If I remember correctly, the first color photograph appeared in the New York Times on October 16, 1997.
Actually, and ironically, I learned this on Wikipedia.
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Sounds like they had an issue with people dumping copyrighted/inappropriate pictures on the site.
I would suggest contacting someone who does make regular contributions (there are thousands of them, you should be able to find one easily). They can upload pictures for you and attribute you as the photographer.
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Oh please. Those are images that they would like one to see. You could also state that the images are misleading as they don't show what the person looks like ordinarily. I think your argument is somewhat specious.
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