On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi after having seen a half-hour documentary on them. One thing I recall was that a good clean photo doing something fairly controversial (eg, drunk outside a club) was worth in the $500 range. A shot of a celebrity just not wanting to be shot was like $100, and a posed celebrity shot was like $50 or less. And all this is presuming that the photos would be published in the week or so afterwards.
The chances of a photographer having old (2-3 years), boring, plain "Hi, my name is Paris Hilton" shots lying around that they would hand over for "not much" sounds pretty good to me. We just need to work out what exactly we can offer them in return.
To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that would be at all contradictory to our mission.
The only problem there is that it treats the "professionals" in a different category than the "amateurs", which I think it somewhat against the philosophy of the place. If WP allows "professionals" to have their name listed (and with a link to their website?), why wouldn't it let "amateurs" list theirs on the same page? Pretty soon it could also devolve into a spam page, the only requirement being contribution of a photograph.
Maybe that's not a problem, though. At least there would be SOME requirement. Actually, perhaps one could set the requirement -- contribute photographs to Wikipedia which can (and are) used in articles and you get to put your name and link on a page for contributing photographers. I don't know if anyone would go for that (either Wikipedians or photographers). It's somewhat of an equivalent of selling ad space, except services rather than money would be transacted. Might be a bad precedent, might lead to some unpleasant arguments ("I contributed 5 pictures of my rear to Wikipedia for the 'buttocks' page, why can't I list my website here?"). Just thinking out loud here.
But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first Google search page in most cases.
I think we have a lot to offer in terms of exposure and attention, even without modifying our system one bit. If we found some way to send a "Hey, want to contribute some of your old, unused photos to Wikipedia?" message around, perhaps it work on its own merit, if it was worded well and presented the pros and cons in a straightforward, no-B.S. fashion.
What they have to gain: free exposure on a high-pagerank, high-traffic site with a professional apperance (no pop-up ads); regular contributors would be more than welcome to have a link to their own website listed on their userpage along with samples of their contributed images.
What they have to lose: very little -- releasing under a viral license like CC-BY-SA would not only require attribution for re-use, but would require all re-use to be itself licensed under a free license, which their normal clientele would not be doing, so they are not competing against themselves; the pictures are likely not going to be doing much sitting at the back of their files gathering dust, and pictures which would be too "boring" for professional use would actually be potentially ideal for Wikipedia, which is somewhat anti-sensationalistic.
FF