Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-28/Featured content

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Six great featured pictures. I told you it was still going strong! J Milburn (talk) 18:59, 29 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure. I found a few of them underwhelming. I have a suggestion that somehow there be two categories for featured pics: one for those originally created by Wikimedians, and one for nominations sourced outside the project. They mean different things to me. Featured articles and lists are all created by Wikimedians.

Tony (talk)

13:34, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's an incredibly self-referential differentiation- I don't really see how navel-gazing is really going to help the project. There are no featured articles/lists from other sources because, firstly, Wikipedia is very particular about what constitutes a good article or list (while the understanding of a "informative and technically adept picture" is more universal, though not entirely so) and, secondly, because we don't really have as much by way of free text sources to plunder. Take a public domain ornithology guidebook; there won't be much by way of text to copy there (the scholarship will probably be out of date, the detail will not be as deep as we like our articles to be, it will be formatted in the manner of a guidebook), but there may well be much by way of images. That said, there are some lists which may as well be taken from elsewhere- practically all the info comes from one source, and it's just the Wikipedian's job to organise and format it. In any case, I really can't see any possible benefit in splitting FPC, and, further, the two categories are not at all neat; it would create something of a false dichotomy. J Milburn (talk) 14:30, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

J Milburn, I understand what you're saying and I'd already thought through these issues, although you've expressed them in a different way. A featured article or list always requires significant creation by WP editors, who must:

steer a careful pathway in the linguistic text between the no-nos of OR and close paraphrasing;
deploy research skills in locating, processing, and referencing sourced information;
(usually) locate appropriate images, position and size them in the text, ensuring the copyright is OK;
apply the style guidelines and the policies.

Far be it for me to decry the work of FP nominators in locating and nominating other people's images; but it seems to be of a different order to the nomination of Wikipedians' original creations (and in images we have a quite different regime concerning OR, interestingly). The grey area is where nominators or reviewers undertake restorations of externally sourced images—these are sometimes significant achievements per se. But a NASA pic of the international space station, for example, unchanged and put up as a featured pic nom—this is more like an award by WP to someone who may not even know their work has been thus acknowledged. Are these just fodder for the main page? If so, don't we have a waiting list of some 2000 images for main-page exposure? In the queueing I'd sooner target from this huge body of images those shot or significantly enhanced by Wikimedians themselves. As a repository of free cultural content, Commons has better grounds in its featured pic process (and its POTY awards) to be wider in scope, including original creations by anyone, not just members of the Wikimedia community. But en.WP is not an image repository: it's an encyclopedia that must be written by a community that embraces multiple talents. Featured articles and lists acknowledge those talents and the associated hard work, but featured pics seems to range through a spectrum from two extremes: (i) identify external pic, check copyright, shove into the nom page; through (ii) restore or tweak externally sourced nom; to (iii) create an original creation, nommed oneself or by another WPian. $Tony (talk)$ 11:41, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and there are also other, less obvious grey areas. The pictures I display on my userpage are featured images which are only freely licensed through my efforts. I didn't just follow the "find, upload, nom" cycle, I went through the negotiation process so that I could upload images previously unfree. Another interesting thought is the work of Shroomydan (talk · contribs); an excellent mushroom photographer who only created an account after his work here was recognised. Quite where he fits onto your spectrum is not clear. I'm also not convinced about your mention of "an award by WP to someone who may not even know their work has been thus acknowledged". If we were giving these photographers barnstars, then yes, that would be the case; but we're not. If this was all about telling the artists what good work they've done, I don't think historical media would be worth nominating at all. Instead, we're recognising the picture, not the creator. I think this hits the crux of the disagreement- you seem to be envisioning a FP process which is there to offer Wikipedian photographers a pat on the back, rather than something (as I imagine the process) that is there to recognise integral images aiding our encyclopedia in some great way. In defence of my view: If we're genuinely trying to be neutral here, why should we be shouting about a photo a Wikipedian took of a building in their home town, but ignoring works of fine art and iconic photography? J Milburn (talk) 12:42, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]