On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
The challenge is that if their version sits orphaned it might as well not exist. I don't believe that we should let prima donnas prevent us from having high quality content... But when someone did a awesome job with 98% of a picture (subject, composition, lighting, image quality, etc) and there is 2% which is highly subjective/viewer dependant which remains debatable (altered saturation, contrast, sharpening)... we should probably trust the person who got the 98% right to make the call on the rest, given our input. That it also keeps the photographer happy contributing is a secondary, but critical, effect.
Where is all this coming from? Wikipedia is a collaborative project. Take a look at WP:FPC on en, and you will see that almost every user-submitted image gets one or more edits applied to it to boost its quality, then we vote on our favourite. Generally, this collaborative image-manipulation process works quite well. If there are some photographers who prefer not to take part in that, that's fine, and I'm sure people would respect their requests if they were made clearly on their image pages.
This really is an abnormal scenario though.
Steve