What Image Should Represent All of Humanity On Wikipedia? (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: If aliens ever do come across the Pioneer spacecraft and make assumptions about the entire human species based on the man and woman etched onto the plaque it carries, this is what they will think of us: We all look like white people; we all look about 30ish years old; we do not wear clothes. It's a problem you encounter anytime you have to choose a few individuals to represent an entire group, and it's one that the editors of Wikipedia have debated for years: What image should grace the top of the "human" entry in the online dictionary?

The photo that's there now, after years of feverish debate, is of an Akha couple from a region of Thailand along the Mekong river. "The photo of the Akha couple remain humanity's type specimens on Wikipedia," writes author Ellen Airhart. "Just as a shriveled northeastern leopard frog at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology represents its whole species, so this couple stands for all of us."

Such musing about the taxonomic representation of the human species could actually have a big impact on our digital future. "Future scientists will have to teach computers, not aliens, to recognize the human image. Right now, software engineers program artificial intelligence to recognize people by feeding them millions of pictures of faces," she writes. "But whose faces? Computer scientists run into the same questions about gender, race, and culture that the Wikipedia editors encountered. Being able to use more than one photo expands the conversation but does not necessarily make it easier."

Comments

African roots

[Zobeid]

Well, I think the Thailanders photo works OK. (Forget about ethnicity for a moment: Their clothing and context imply a pre-industrial way of life that was dominant throughout human history but now is diminishing rapidly!) However I would have more likely have suggested a recognizably African couple. My reasoning: Humans originated from Africa, and it still holds the greatest genetic and cultural diversity of any region. People elsewhere in the world are offshoots from that root.

Re:Musings from selfish people

[AmiMoJo]

They do seem to be over-thinking it a bit. Take this bit of the ideal image criteria:

"All of the humans would be clothed, because that's how human beings are most commonly encountered: unclothed depictions should be used at the top of the "biology" section, in order to clearly depict their anatomy, but it is potentially misleading to use such an image as the lead image in the article"

Yeah... People will be mislead by a naked photo and think that's how human beings are, despite a literal lifetime of counter-examples.

Having said that, some of the submissions are clearly unsuitable. The woman in a burka is atypical and her clothing hides many important features of humans such as legs and arms. Many of the others only have one person when really there should be at least two to represent both genders.

Kind of amazing how hard to is to find a photo of a clothed man and a woman in neutral poses that is reasonably interesting and attractive, which fits in the side bar area and is freely licenced. The Akha is actually by far the best that anyone has proposed, much better than the current Pioneer drawing.

Re:it cant be done with a single couple

[denzacar]

Otherwise I think you're going to need to either do a computer generated average image

A computer generated image based on a global model which would include all most recent census data from all over the globe would work great for that.
Particularly if the whole process was automated, updating itself on its own as new data arrives.

And as for anyone feeling underrepresented by such an image, you can legitimately tell them to go and reproduce themselves.
Reproduce themselves billions of times.