[WikiEN-l] Uploading images should be a privilige, not a right

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> The "more people" imbalance is what I meant. The great majority of
> editors work on what interests them personally, rather than taking
> guidance from somebody else, and that seems to extend to picture
> taking as well. Most of the WP photographers I know of tend to have
> an intense interest in one or a few areas, so for instance they'll
> upload photos of many kinds of cars, but no photos of the towns
> where they're finding the cars.

We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where?  I
didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject
area photographers, with only a few exceptions.

I just checked the pages of several performance cars likely to be of
interest and mostly found a mixture of unfree, "my car", and a few
free snapshots.  I didn't see any evidence of a dedicated subject area
photographer on the few cars types I checked.

> An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.

There can be no doubt after you've submitted a free photo only to have
it replaced with an unfree photo that someone likes better... and
being left to battle it out. :)   We're too quick to acknowledge the
work of someone who uploads a lot of found on the web, but too slow
the recognize the work that goes into a quality piece of custom made
work.

> My limiting factor
> is that it takes less than a minute to compose and shoot, but several
> minutes to crop and fix up, so I have a growing backlog...

Minutes? Haha.  Minutes is the same order of work as making a
non-minor article edit.
I'm happy when I'm able to pull off four quality images of a subject
with three hours work from start to finish.

Yes, photography represents a sharp upfront investment and we don't
respect it accordingly because we're too oriented around folks who
provide images by operating google image search.

> Another
> limiting factor is that taking "encyclopedic" rather than "art" pictures
> is a body of technique unto itself; for some things it can take major
> commitments of driving and/or walking around to get decent shot.

Yes, this is quite true... and it is the biggest reason why we need to
move away from relying on outside sources for illustrations.

> Perhaps more people can find a free hour between 9 and 10 pm to sort
> stubs :-) than the same hour during daylight to take pictures of
> downtown buildings.

I don't disagree about the resource challenges... But the fact remains
that there are many thousands of people submitting photos to flikr or
contest sites like dpchallenge
(http://www.dpchallenge.com/challenge_archive.php).  Obviously there
are folks out there who *are* taking pictures, we need to pull them
into the fold and get them taking pictures we need licensed in a way
that we can use. :)

Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even
contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in
more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not
that interested in attracting photographers.