On 7/21/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)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.