On 8/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)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