[WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 8:38 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html
>
> One error on licensing. Claim that Wikipedia requires you to give up
> your copyright unchallenged. Otherwise, pretty good! And should have
> the right effect in terms of promo photo donations.

The article I've followed that used to have a bad image is Ian Thorpe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Thorpe

Our main image of Thorpe used to be this (awful) one:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ian_Thorpe_on_a_plane_cropped.jpg

That was cropped from this one:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ian_Thorpe_on_a_plane.jpg

Which is currently further down the article.

The other two images we have in the Thorpe article are the main one
(much better quality):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ian_Thorpe_with_a_smile.jpg

Which is a crop of this one:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geoff_Raby_%26_Ian_Thorpe.jpg

Not sure how the licensing works there.

The other image is a non-free one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ian_Thorpe_dq.jpg

That shows him as a swimmer, what he is famous for, and shows him in
the process of disqualification by overbalancing. There was a time
when those arguing for *absolutely* minimal free use would have argued
against that (they may still do, I don't know). But in this case, the
article being a featured article gives some assurance that this has
been considered in several discussions.

I also think that it is the drive to improve an article and bring it
to featured standards that sometimes gives people the extra oomph to
go and find that free picture that might be out there, rather than not
bother looking.

I had assumed the main image was a promo one under a free license, but
it seems not.

Carcharoth