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.'"

Comments

This is good and Jerry Avenaim doesn't get it

[Yvanhoe]

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.

Re:This is good and Jerry Avenaim doesn't get it

[Daengbo]

Indeed, instead of this:

'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.'"

We should be hearing "If the publicists really want clients in the best light, they'll provide a picture which meets the largest encyclopedia's standards."

They just don't get it. It's one picture that you donate to the world in exchange for your name being mentioned. Sports sponsors have been doing something similar for a long time.

Re:This is good and Jerry Avenaim doesn't get it

[ta bu shi da yu]

Indeed. It's very amusing that on one hand, celebrities and public figures don't like the low quality images on Wikipedia, yet won't release pictures under Creative Commons licensing. They can't have it both ways. Either you get amateur and often less than flattering free pictures on the world's largest encyclopedia, or you release a high quality image under the appropriate license for use on the project.

If you don't like either choice, then tough.

Freedom versus high quality pictures

[noidentity]

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.'

Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available. What more is there to say?

Re:Freedom versus high quality pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly does rejecting images, which the author allows to be used within *.wikipedia.org, but not elsewhere, advance freedom?

You're kidding, right? Let me rephrase your question to something with less tortured double-negatives:

How exactly does only allowing images under Creative Commons, advance freedom?

Well now isn't that just a stupid question? It advances freedom because the source material is free. Tada!

One would think, etc. etc. blah blah BAWWWWW my images, giant axe to grind over Wikipedia and Obama, blah blah

Well you clearly have an axe to grind over Wikipedia, and you're also butthurt about the current President of the United States of America. The last bit has nothing to do with the topic at hand, so that makes you either an idiot, or a troll.

Re:Freedom versus high quality pictures

[SolitaryMan]

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.'

Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available.

This is the good thing. I don't come to Wikipedia to see HQ images. I come for free information I can immediately use: quote or contribute. There are plenty of other sites, where you can find images.

Re:Freedom versus high quality pictures

[FireFury03]

Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available. What more is there to say?

You could elaborate, I suppose... How exactly does rejecting images, which the author allows to be used within *.wikipedia.org, but not elsewhere, advance freedom?

1. It means you don't have to deal with investigating the licence on every bit of content - if you want to reuse some content on Wikipedia then you *know* what the licence is because its all the same.
2. Allowing non-CC licensed content would reduce the amount of CC licensed content on Wikipedia (articles would choose to use the "better" non-Free images *instead* of the Free ones), and that really would harm freedom.

One would think, they want their pages to be printable and (re)publishable, but in that case, the authors wouldn't be credited (there is no author's name printed, when you print the page) — contrary to the current license...

Yes, this is rather at odds with the licence - the Wikipedia templates really need to automatically add an attribution caption to all images that are embedded in a page.

Photographers do maintain the copyright of course

[3dWarlord]

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.

They want to eat their cake and keep it

[Arancaytar]

"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.

Photographer maintains copyright

[incense]

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?

Venue for Professional Photographers

[gonz]

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

The NYT doesn't understand the web

[Shin-LaC]

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."