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.
Sometimes they are really really bad, but then other times, it’s the only picture I see of the person that hasn’t been doctored and airbrushed to hell and back.
Given how outdated and poorly sourced most of wikipedia is it’s kind of ironic we’re focusing on celebrity portraits
Wikipedia focuses on those other issues as well, they just happen to be a group of volunteers trying to manage the most comprehensive repository of information that the world has ever seen. If you see issues with articles, you are always welcome to sign up and edit the articles yourself!
I know we do. I’ve got thousands of wikipedia edits.
And it often isn’t as easy as just editing unfortunately. A lot of pages have overprotective people watching the changelog trying to shelter their pet theories/biases.
seems strange for you to criticize the quality of Wikipedia, then? you have personal experience that demonstrates why these volunteers are putting their time towards this instead of towards editing articles - editing articles is a difficult and sometimes contentious process.
Wikipedia editor NeedsGlasses made a good point in the discussion on Jeremy Strongs page about why we should keep the “bad” photos
[…] As a wikipedia editor i think it’s important to remember that in some way wikipedia represents the viewpoint of the common man. It is not a direct participant at events but a mere spectator. […]
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.
Finally, we’re starting to tackle the real problems
Darwin almighty if a celeb wants their photo changed on Wikipedia all they have to do is submit a decent photo they’ve taken themselves.
honestly you aren’t wrong. I’d guess it’s just a case of the Wikipedia photo being a bottom priority for them, but then you would think “update Wikipedia photo” would be somewhere on every publicist’s to-do list. Maybe this project will encourage more publicists to explore how to do this.
The bad photos are just because of the wiki license requirements, it’s why there are a lot of military photos on Wikipedia because they’re all public domain by default.
As did Brian David Gilbert:
and none of those are the ones currently used on his article lol
They’d run afoul of the whole “editing your own article” restrictions.
While they probably shouldn’t actually put it on the article themselves, they can submit it to Wikimedia Commons or even just post it somewhere public under a creative commons licence
They don’t need to edit the article, just submit a decent photo to wikimedia. The editing can be done by others as soon as the portrait has been uploaded.
I’d argue that Kyle_Bartley’s is actually one of the best Wikipedia images I’ve seen
You don’t have to add an underscore for the hyper link to work by the way
Lol EXCELLENT example of the kind of photo Wikiportraits is trying to replace. It’s hilarious, but not great for the internet’s most reliable resource.
This must never be changed
This is really cool. I love how things like Wikipedia just show how weirdly f’d up our whole society is by doing something without extracting maximum compensation and breaking systems.
Wikipedia does such a solid, unmitigated GOOD service for the world, especially the English speaking world.
No no, leave them that way.
Yeah I kinda like the tradition of terrible photographs on Wikipedia tbh
