There's always http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:QI 5,900+ Self made ie Commons Users only photographs not NASA,Congress or Flickr photos etc
2009/7/20 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
Check out this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html?_r=1
In it that author complaints about the low quality photographs of well known personalities in popular culture on English Wikipedia.
This short coming is attributed in part to : "Recent photographs on Wikipedia almost exclusively are 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."
But the author is apparently missing the detail that the problem he's complaining about is largely limited to people, where there tend to be special access challenges and where their exists a very high quality bar because of the ubiquity of staged publicity shots.
Wikimedia has an enormous collection of contributor created photographs of exceptional quality— but they tend to be in the areas of architecture, landscapes, man made objects, plants, etc. Not so much famous people.
I'd love to be able to give the author some counter examples, but all of commons collections of featured grade images are intermixed with the best freely licensed images we could find elsewhere.
In the past I'd hoped that providing many accolades to non-contributors would encourage them to come contribute directly, but I'm not aware of any cases of this happening. Anyone have any examples?
Can the next POTY contest please only consider images created by Wikimedians? The bar for qualifying could be pretty minimal, "All relevant copyright holders for the image have commons accounts", or the like ... would still serve the purpose of highlighting commons' value as a source for unique works and not just as a partial mirror of flickr and US government websites.
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