On 5/21/12, Anthony <wikim...@inbox.org> wrote: > Thousands of users all taking in upon themselves to act in in good > faith, without discussion and in ways which are potentially flawed, to > try to improve an encyclopedia in the way they see best. We should > come up with a catchy name for that. Maybe something based on a > Hawaiian word.
That's a cute point. Though some discussion does take place on Wikipedia about the editing, it's not all the blind leading the blind, or people working in isolation, though much of it is. On 5/19/12, Horologium <user.horolog...@gmail.com> wrote: > one was a link to a find-a-grave page with a photo of the > subject (unneeded because we already had a photo of the subject) That is arguable. It depends whether it is the same photo at the same time of life or not. If the only free photo of someone shows them in old age, a link to a site legally hosting a picture of them in their youth would be relevant and should be kept in the external links section as something that readers would likely want to follow. (It also betrays an attitude of: we have one image, we don't need any more, as opposed to curating a visual record of the topic). This leads me on to one of the big gripes I have about Wikipedia and its use of images. Because of the free-content model that Wikipedia is based on, the image use in articles tends to be skewed towards public domain and freely licensed images. For many subjects, this is not a problem, but for some subjects to get a balanced *visual* record of a topic, you need to use (or refer in the text to) non-free images as well, or if fair use is not possible, to link to a site that legally hosts such images. The 'ideal' encyclopedia would use these images (and likely have to pay to use them), but Wikipedia seems to think that it is possible to have encyclopedia articles that use free images only, and still maintain NPOV in terms of the images used. I actually think that in some cases the use of only PD or free sources skews the visual presentation, and badly so. What I tend to do in such cases is link to places where the reader can view such images. I can provide some examples if anyone wishes to discuss this. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
