this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Technology

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Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits [404 Media] (www.404media.co)
submitted 3 weeks ago by theangriestbird@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 24 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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.

[–] MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

They'd run afoul of the whole "editing your own article" restrictions.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 11 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 3 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] WimpyWoodchuck@feddit.org 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As did Brian David Gilbert:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DBe6qwYzJNM/

[–] theangriestbird@beehaw.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

and none of those are the ones currently used on his article lol

[–] theangriestbird@beehaw.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

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.