On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
The "more people" imbalance is what I meant. The great majority of editors work on what interests them personally, rather than taking guidance from somebody else, and that seems to extend to picture taking as well. Most of the WP photographers I know of tend to have an intense interest in one or a few areas, so for instance they'll upload photos of many kinds of cars, but no photos of the towns where they're finding the cars.
We have people that work on submitting photos of cars? Where? I didn't even think we were doing so well as to have dedicated subject area photographers, with only a few exceptions.
I just checked the pages of several performance cars likely to be of interest and mostly found a mixture of unfree, "my car", and a few free snapshots. I didn't see any evidence of a dedicated subject area photographer on the few cars types I checked.
An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
There can be no doubt after you've submitted a free photo only to have it replaced with an unfree photo that someone likes better... and being left to battle it out. :) We're too quick to acknowledge the work of someone who uploads a lot of found on the web, but too slow the recognize the work that goes into a quality piece of custom made work.
My limiting factor is that it takes less than a minute to compose and shoot, but several minutes to crop and fix up, so I have a growing backlog...
Minutes? Haha. Minutes is the same order of work as making a non-minor article edit. I'm happy when I'm able to pull off four quality images of a subject with three hours work from start to finish.
Yes, photography represents a sharp upfront investment and we don't respect it accordingly because we're too oriented around folks who provide images by operating google image search.
Another limiting factor is that taking "encyclopedic" rather than "art" pictures is a body of technique unto itself; for some things it can take major commitments of driving and/or walking around to get decent shot.
Yes, this is quite true... and it is the biggest reason why we need to move away from relying on outside sources for illustrations.
Perhaps more people can find a free hour between 9 and 10 pm to sort stubs :-) than the same hour during daylight to take pictures of downtown buildings.
I don't disagree about the resource challenges... But the fact remains that there are many thousands of people submitting photos to flikr or contest sites like dpchallenge (http://www.dpchallenge.com/challenge_archive.php). Obviously there are folks out there who *are* taking pictures, we need to pull them into the fold and get them taking pictures we need licensed in a way that we can use. :)
Today, we grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not that interested in attracting photographers.