[WikiEN-l] Slightly less hideous placeholders

[William Pietri]

Andrew Gray wrote:
>
> As an aside, what articles should we be putting these on? Leaving
> aside the cases where it is known as a fact that there are no images
> of the subject*, it seems to me that it's rather impractical to put it
> on the article of anyone active before, say, the Second World War -
> the law of diminishing returns kicks in with time, and having a
> placeholder that's almost guaranteed never to get an image is probably
> a net loss over having a nice clean article with no image, period.
>   

I think that's a good point, and I don't have a strong opinion myself. 
But I did want to pass along a data point.

Last night my girlfriend mentioned that she tried to use Wikipedia to 
figure out who an actor was. But there was no picture, so she went off 
to IMDB. She told me that she'd noticed a lot fewer pictures lately, and 
so got the impression that Wikipedia was trying not to have pictures.

So from a UI design perspective, consistently placing a picture 
placeholder on biographical articles can signal something broader than 
just something about that particular article.

William



-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri