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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