On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 1:26 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Very few illustrations add significant information to any article at all, both in and out of Wikipedia. An image of *any* person in a biographical article is only necessary to the physiognomists. People have just become accustomed to pretty pictures in books as well as in arttcles. Most of those pictures mean nothing; they only serve to break up the monotony of solid text.
Argh. We've done this before, but...
Images are a key, important role in learning and education. The level of text and fact retention after reading increases significantly on articles, books, etc. which have a minimum density of included images. That's common education psychology theory and why normal print encyclopedias and textbooks have a significant density of images for the most part.
In particular, the interest that people have in reading web pages from top to bottom increases significantly if they have multimedia content (photos in particular) which are easily visible as part of the initial view.
In terms of the role that we play as an educational tool, *which is why the project is here in the first place*, images are a *key* part of that role. They should not be downplayed or minimized. A vast majority of our articles have an image deficit at the current time. Few have too many.
This viewpoint that images aren't that useful keeps resurfacing, but does nothing to enhance the anti-fair-use arguments.