On 8/2/06, Garion96 garion96@gmail.com wrote:
I just see pictures as extra, they are nice and really help the encyclopedia. But the text for me is what makes a high quality encyclopedia, not the images.
Well, each to his own, I'm a big fan of good images, and kind of see the text as the necessary amount of padding to avoid people removing the images on the basis of there being too many :) Seriously, though, it depends on the subject. I would much rather see images of mountains, castles, rivers or musical instruments than read about them. On the other hand, images of people, trains, computers, wars etc aren't that interesting.
I do like it that we can make use of fair use though. But I think it should be used more like Jimbo recently mentioned here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3APublicity_photos&...
The man speaks much sense there. I hadn't thought of using our bargaining power to obtain new free images.
Though I would disagree that album art is the "only sensible illustration" of an album - other possible images include the artist during recording or writing, places or events that inspired it, photos of the recording studio (think Abbey Road), the producer, or even concerts that made use of the album material...
Steve