On 27/03/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
What I'd like to see is a total cleanup of all non-free images of living people that can be replaced with free content, using the "No free image" method as e.g. demonstrated on: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tommi_Hovi&oldid=114878341
I've been doing this whenever I happen across a bio without a picture at all, though the last one I zapped a promo pic on was [[Charlotte Church]]. (Famous current TV host? Get a picture!) As it happened, Heligo and I were on IRC, and Heligo promptly found a CC-by-sa image on Flickr, so it was imageless for a very short time.
Though that's not going to happen in every case - I doubt anyone's going to find a free image of [[J. D. Salinger]] any time soon - but IMO is a principle we could do with being a fair bit harsher on.
It would also be nice if free content became a more consistent part of the featured article candidate process; at least a couple recent articles featured on the Main Page had to have their images removed because of excessive use of non-free content.
FAC does police this pretty strongly and has done for quite some time. I recall they were very reluctant to let [[Chuck Palahniuk]] through until it had a non-promo image (it now has a free image).
- d.