On 17/10/2007, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
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
IMDB has placeholders on everyone but I believe they are more relaxed about copyright.