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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.'"
Creative commons attribution is the only copyright and patent law we need. I look forward to the day when music is free to copy and musicians make their money from live performance, when images are free to copy and the original has value because it's, well, the original. When the written word may be copied and recopied, when patent law is no longer needed because people invent and discover for prestige.
I have other theories:
- Knowledge in words flows unhindered, images can only come to stay in our heads from RL, TV, Magazines, ...
We can not reproduce images and forward it to other peoples brains. We only can with words.
- Photos can not be improved incrementally
- (tongue-in-cheek) You have to go outside for photos
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
The combination of the NYT's editing and Slashdot's summarizing has been rather unkind to that "they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright" quote, imho.
> If a professional photographer wanted to increase his exposure (no pun intended), he could contribute to wikipedia under a free license.
That's exactly what the guy who the quote was attributed to has done.
The story quoted Jerry Avenaim, who has contributed his photos to Wikipedia, for example here. He says that photographers get paid very little for celebrity shots and make most of their money on resales of their photos (presumably print and online). If a freely licensed version on Wikipedia exists, then many publishers would simply take the wikipedia photo.
Given that Avenaim himself has contributed photos, he's obviously aware of the upsides and the downsides of doing so - he even notes that he gets free publicity out of it. But re his "they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright" quote, it sounds like he meant Wikipedia should have a license that allows photographers to contribute _only to Wikipedia_ (presumably *.wikipedia.org) and still retain rights for usage of that photo anywhere else.
I can see how this could be made to work. Have a 'better' photo for use on wikipedia.org, and point to an alternate free copy for use e.g. when other sites re-use wikipedia. That way photographers can contribute high-quality photos AND get paid, wikipedia gains, AND freedom to reuse is not lost.
However, given that wikipedians are pretty hard-core about free (libre) content, it's unlikely anyone will take him seriously. Which is a pity. Good illustrations really enhance the value of an encyclopedia, but I'm guessing wikipedia won't compromise on its core 'free-ness' thing to get them.
Go somewhere random
I am sure Betacommand alone has turned hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers off Wikipedia with his automated deletion rampages based on "insufficiently explicit copyright tags" and such (doing it on images that were correctly tagged years before he and his ilk even joined to arbitrarily rewrite tagging policies)... He was banned, but there are still dozens of admins like him around.
Next time you just tell him that your performance is choreographed, as such his photographs are a derivative work and he may not redistribute them without your permission.
Sometime you should try clicking on an image on Wikipedia. The results might surprise you.
I'm aware of this. If you'd bothered to read the post I was replying to you would see that the comment was made that printing a Wikipedia article results in something that has no attribution for photos since the attribution isn't captioned. And the poster is absolutely right, which is why I suggested that it would make sense for the templates to automatically add an attribution caption to the embedded image.
Sadly, like most Slashdotters you seem more interested in flaming than actually reading the discussion.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Indeed - and conversely, photographers care more about being able to retain restrictive licences, rather than high quality pictures.
As well as fully agreeing with Wikipedia's stance, to be honest I don't see the problem anyway: if a celebrity is bothered that there's an awful picture of them, then that's all the more encouragement for them to donate a free image :) Similarly with fans, if they're annoyed at a poor quality picture of their favourite celebrity.
The fundamental problem here is not Wikipedia, but that almost all celebrity pictures are copyrighted and released under non-free licences. I've wondered if there's a different attitude among photographers and programmers - even among non-professionals (i.e., "amateurs" in the literal sense of the term, but where they treat it as a serious hobby and do produce good quality work), in my experience I've come across the attitude that even though they work for free, they do not want to release even a single picture under a licence that allows commercial use. Compare that with programming, where many are happy to produce open source software that is high quality, and allows commercial use (indeed, you get arguments about GPL vs BSD, about whether even the GPL is too restrictive...)
Similarly for professional work. If I do work as a programmer, even under contract, it goes without saying that the person paying me money gets the copyright of the work I produce. But try hiring a photographer for an event such as a wedding - AIUI, typically the photographer retains the copyright (and so strictly speaking, a married couple would be breaking the law to photocopy their own wedding photos).
Not to mention that the photographers do maintain their copyright. Only a permissive license to use the image is required, and then only for the image uploaded to Wikipedia, not the original work.
The world is filled with control freaks, it seems.
Well, it's the permissive aspect that is problematic - they are no doubt afraid that the image will become the image of choice of the celebrity; for which they will get no money.
Not that I agree with that, but most photographers are very protective of their copyright protections around usage; simply because that's how they make their money.
Of course, most of them aren't going to create the iconic image; more likely the real reason a Wiki photo would be used a lot is it is free. In the photographer's mind however, each use translates to ost money, never mind that the demand curve for the image approaches zero as teh price becomes non-zero.
What most people don't realize is for a professional photographer, if they are luck 1 out of 10 photos are useable for sale. Why don't they sell the 1st rate photos to the tabloids, and then release a 2nd rate photo with minimal or no resale value (which is probably much better than an amateur photo)to Wikipedia. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Good photographers are manic about making sure that every single piece of work they produce is as close to perfect as possible. You, the general public, my potential future clients, may only see one picture I've taken in your whole life. In that case, it had better be perfect if I'm going to stand any chance of getting any of your future business. That one photo is my representative to the world. The same thing is true of every photo I release.
Here's a dirty secret: we already know that most of your pictures are discardable. We also know that da Vinci jotted out thousands of half-baked ideas, van Gogh painted lots of non-famous pictures, the Beatles had some crappy songs, and there is scary stuff in any software project's CVS/SVN/git repositories.
Unless photography is somehow magically different than every other profession in the history of the world and no one told me, I'd say that your ideas of what would happen if people saw your sub-stellar works are not based in reality.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Thus, releasing anything that's substandard is self-defeating.
You could license it "free to redistribute as long as you don't attribute it to me". Or even "free to redistribute as long as you attribute it to that other guy" :-)