[WikiEN-l] There are no pictures in Wikipedia any more

[William Pietri]

Stephen Bain wrote:
> On 9/24/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>   
>> You know, the number of Wikipedia articles with pictures in them
>> is really plummeting.  I just went from [[Talia Shire]] to [[Joey
>> Tribbiani]] to [[Matt LeBlanc]] and noticed that there were no
>> pictures in any of them.
>>     
>
> I know what you're saying, but really, is it that hard to find a
> picture of Matt LeBlanc? We're not hurting any readers by not having a
> photograph.
>   

That's an intriguing argument. It's not hard to find almost any bit of 
information on Wikipedia, so by that reasoning we wouldn't be hurting 
anybody by shutting down entirely. All Wikipedia does is make existing 
information better available.

What somebody looks like is a pretty important piece of information to a 
lot of people.  If you search for Matt LeBlanc on Google, of the top ten 
results, all of them display a picture, all but one prominently. One 
mentions pictures in the title. And Google even puts his picture on the 
search page.

And good thing they do, as I had no idea who "Matt LeBlanc" was until I 
saw those pictures.

So I'd say that from a user perspective, leaving the picture out is a 
pretty big deal.

William



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