WikiPortraits, a group of volunteer photographers, has been covering festivals and shooting celebrities specifically to improve images in the public domain.
Since last January, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and award ceremonies, and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos of celebrity attendees. And the celebrity attendees are often quite excited about it. Dixit, for example, found Jeremy Strong of Succession at a New York showing of the new The Apprentice and asked to take a new headshot of him for Wikipedia.
“His publicist said no,” Dixit said. “But Jeremy said, ‘Wait, you’re from Wikipedia? For the love of God, please take down that photo. You’d be doing me a service.’ So he stood and posed, and I got a shot of him.” Strong’s old photo was from 2014.
Wikipedia editor NeedsGlasses made a good point in the discussion on Jeremy Strongs page about why we should keep the “bad” photos
I think that is a little backwards thinking. Common folk are at these events taking the pictures. Common folk are producing high quality content. I’m pretty sure the celebrities themselves wouldn’t have as much information on their peers as the collective of researchers do. Far from mere spectators.