On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high
Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free stakes.
quality even if it lacked fair use images. Most encyclopedias do *not*
It would be, shall we say, "less high quality".
have an image for every article and do not feel the need to, much less images of lesser known celebrities and video games.
Wikipedia is not most encyclopaedias, it's a hell of a lot better. It's much broader, and significantly deeper in many areas. Most encyclopaedias don't have a photo for every article because they don't have room to publish them, not because they don't feel they would be of value.
Also, I think the more free and good looking images Wikipedia has, the more impressive and useful it is. Wikipedia is currently the only site I know of on the 'net where you can get high-quality vector images illustrating a wide-variety of things (parts of cars, household items, hydrogen bombs).
Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch, there are thousands of articles that need some.
Ugly free images can also inspire better free images. I have many times replaced well-intentioned but amateurish free images with re-done, more professional looking free versions. If everything is a slick un-free image, though, the obviousness of what should be replaced goes down a bit.
I would have no qualms against putting a red border around non free images.
Steve