I’m talking about the main one, in the upper right corner when you open their page. Wikipedia has a fairly strict policy that any pictures on it are to be put there legally. Because of this, a lot of celebrities have pictures snapped by fans. If I was a celeb., I’d upload my own nice photo, like JMS did.
So, who has the best and worst pic on Wikipedia?
Best: David Duchovny - It’s a decent picture.
Worst: Eric Idle- He should put his own up.
Yours?
Vince Vaughn looks haggard.
I’ve never understood this, nor the related phenomenon of missing pictures on IMDb. I mean, what actor doesn’t love free publicity? Even if it makes very little difference, it makes some, and the benefit-to-cost ratio has to blow away anything else actors or their agents do.
Here’s one. He’s a Grammy nominated classical guitarist, and his brother is a professional photographer who gave this particular image to the Public Domain.
If I may toot my own horn, I’m fairly proud of this picture I added to the WP article on Leon Redbone.
The article pic of Kate Bush is pretty bad, which is a shame as she is still a beautiful woman. That’s what happens when you’re not interested in publicity and avoid the spotlight.
It looks like he changed it, but for a long time, Matt LeBlanc had this picture up on Wiki. I can only assume that someone put it up when Friends first got famous (or rather, when wikipedia got big enough that it included celebrity stuff) and it was just never updated. But I’m surprised no Friends fanatics changed it for him, it’s just such an awful picture.
People who make money selling content are often very wary of putting out content for free. I mean, truly free, where people are free to deface it or even sell it.
Wikipedia does not accept non-free pictures of real famous people. The rule is, if they are alive, you can in theory get a real picture of them, and thus there is no excuse to use a non-free image. The only way it is acceptable is if the image itself is notable, and thus worthy of discussion.
It’s also worth noting that (officially) you are not allowed to edit your own page nor that of anyone near to you.
The policy seems a bit more nuanced than that. It’s strongly discouraged, but not completely banned. And one of the things that’s explicitly permitted is uploading a photo:
Tom Cruise used to have this one as the main photo (for about a year), but it’s since been changed.
So, if I understand the rules, you can send Wikipedia a preferred picture of yourself and they will put it up if the rights are cleared? Because basically, JMS did give his photo to fans and ask them to put it up, which is nearly the same thing.
I, too, am surprised how many people just let crappy pictures of themselves go up and stay up. I’d at least ask a friend to put a decent, rights-free, photo of me up.
Don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or what, but I don’t see anything wrong with any of the pictures presented here: this is what those people look like in real life, ie. fine.
I love the photo of Andrew Vachss though some find it very vaguely creepy.
The Matt LeBlanc one is just a poor-quality picture. Overexposed and slightly blurry.
Basically, you’d expect famous people to put up a nice, professional photo of themselves on a major site like Wikipedia. Most have good photos on IMDB.
Kevin Bacon looks like he’s thinking about murdering someone just out of frame with that statuette.
Damn you, I came into this thread to post that! He has the most awesome Wikipedia picture in the world, bar none.
Paul McCartney’s photo looks pretty good, especially considering it’s a relatively recent one.
A quick glance at the discussion page about the photo and you can see the fight that goes on getting any sort of decent image on Wikipedia.
I enjoy working on Wikipedia, but the best description I have come up with about the annoying parts is this - volunteer bureaucrats. It’s like the old saw about academic politics being the most vicious type because the stakes are so low.
