On 5/18/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, Silly question - are "artists' impressions" (pictures attempting to illustrate a subject in the absence of definitive information) allowed in Wikipedia? There are topics where we will never have a free image. Could we envisage letting editors draw an image, stating clearly that it's simply an "artist's impression"? Would it violate WP:OR?
It's tricky. I had the discussion a while ago on [[Katie Holmes]], where I added this free content drawing from Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/mricon/2081064/in/set-52272/
Someone later replaced it with a fair use photo. We did argue a bit about WP:NOR, but it also turned out that the drawing was actually traced from a famous photograph of Holmes, rendering the free content argument null.
In another case on de.wikipedia.org, a user created many fairly abstract drawings of celebrities and added them to articles. These are now all removed. There may have been copyright reasons for that, but they also looked a bit weird and out of place.
From these anecdotes I would conclude that we have to be very clear
that the picture is an original work and not a directly derivative one, especially not from a single work. In addition, there has to be general consensus that the picture accurately and neutrally depicts whatever it is meant to depict. Insofar as it is possible to cite sources, they should be cited.
As for WP:NOR, you could make the argument about any original creation by Wikipedians. We do not. What matters more, especially in the case of living people, is that the original creations are generally considered to be good, encyclopedic and useful.
Erik