On 18/05/06, 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?
We have plenty of diagrams of things where it's inappropriate, impossible or ineffective to have a photograph - many of our engineering articles, for example, have drawn diagrams of machinery rather than photographs which don't actually show much.
In some circumstances ([[F-19]]!) an "artists impression" might be OR, but in general terms sketching something is no more OR than touching up a photo of it.