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WikiPortraits rule!

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By Smallbones
Celebrity photos became a big news story this month. See this issue's In the media and Essay articles for more on this topic.

The media have been complaining that the photos in Wikipedia's articles on celebrities are not of adequate quality. But they've also noted that project WikiPortraits is making progress in replacing bad celebrity portraits. The Signpost presents a selection from project WikiPortraits below.

Celebrities who cannot wait for WikiPortraits or other Wiki photographers to find them have at least two other options.

  • Take a selfie and upload it to Wikimedia Commons. Anybody can do it!
  • Have your agent arrange a photo session with a professional photographer who agrees to license the photos CC BY-SA 4.0 and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. As with almost every photo on Wikipedia, these will be available to everybody to use as long as they give proper attribution.

WikiPortraits's excellent photos

  • Frodo (2024 Sundance Film Festival)
    Frodo (2024 Sundance Film Festival)
  • Goh Nakamura (2024 Sundance 2024)
    Goh Nakamura (2024 Sundance 2024)

Photographers

Frank Schulenburg, Fuzheado, Jay Dixit, Jennifer 8. Lee, Kevin Payravi, Frank Sun, Bryan Berlin, Harald Krichel, Adam Chitayat, Bea Phi, John Sears, Sriya Sarkar, AirEdits, Kirby Taylor

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22 March 2025 (all comments)
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    • I think it is a very fine line between letting people pose for their own wikipedia page photo presenting a certain persona and letting people edit their own wikipedia page. I think we should be cautious about using any deliberately posed photos because of the precedent it sets. It will open the floodgates to publicity photos. NeedsGlasses (talk) 08:02, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      • These types of photos are for celebrities, which are a very large part of the encyclopedia. Very roughly we're talking about 20-25% of all articles! We do need good photos for this many articles. I do think that getting the celebrities or their agents to upload their photos would be the most efficient solution. If we just had a program that would contact the agents and tell them what they needed to do to upload them to Commons, we'd be much better off than currently. I'd suggest something very simple, say suggesting a normal photo studio take and upload 3 headshots of the style used for high-school yearbooks. Of course they'd want to get a bit fancier and that might make the articles a bit more entertaining, but hopefully they wouldn't go too far overboard. If they did, Wikipedia editors might not include the extravagant photos in the articles. And the cost to young struggling actors? Maybe a couple hundred bucks? Agents used to distribute photos of their clients to newspapers all the time for use in news stories. Why not now? Smallbones(smalltalk) 15:05, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Great initiative, more better portraits for better article quality.–Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 01:30, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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