On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
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And even this excuse doesn't work for the Bradley example. Having only one side of a dispute because one side of the dispute is a published author and can more easily get her side published in a reliable source certainly isn't "arcana".
There is a similar distortion of the record as "seen on Wikipedia" in terms of images as well. I've long held the view that it is important to present a balanced visual record of a subject in a Wikipedia article, both in terms of what is presented in the article and what is linked to elsewhere (including galleries of images on Commons and external links).
One of the problems, though, is that the founding principle that content must be freely licensed has resulted in large swathes of images being declared forbidden (because you would need to pay to use them and you couldn't freely redistribute them). There are also freedom of panorama considerations that lead to many images being excluded that many people not familiar with how this varies from country to country expressing surprise that pictures of modern statues and buildings in public places in some countries are not allowed on Commons.
What this results in is a strange absence of some pictures you might expect to see in an article, and a preponderance of images from free sources (such as the US government, the Australian government, and various other source). But for some countries, this is missing. Thus some articles that you would expect to see illustrated by images from the history of that country are instead illustrated by whatever can be found in free sources from other countries, or very old images rather than more recent ones.
So people looking at the images in Wikipedia might notice an absence of certain types of images and a preponderance of pictures from US sources instead. Most of the time this is not a problem, but in some cases I think it can distort the record. Kind of like breaching NPOV for the visual record. The balance can be redressed by including external links to other images from other sources, but it still feels like rather than selecting the *best* pictures to illustrate something, the images chosen are the best of the *free* images. My view has always been that if there is a better, non-free image, it should be mentioned in the article and linked to in a reference or external link, not just ignored until it becomes free.
This is why I was saying that information in borderline sources could be mentioned in an external link or a footnote or as an aside in a reference. Of the three, I think providing an external link and letting the reader follow it and make up their own mind is best.
Carcharoth