On a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits

March 12, 2025 3:11 PM

Wikipedia portraits are famously bad, so much so that there's an Instagram page dedicated to them. They're amateurish. They're old. Sometimes, like in the case of English footballer Kyle Bartley, they're just weird. (Is that a referee’s finger in his mouth?) WikiPortraits, a group of volunteer photographers, has been covering festivals and shooting celebrities specifically to improve images in the public domain. (404Media)
posted by DirtyOldTown (21 comments total)

I get the urge to want to improve things, especially when it's in your field, but also... can't we just have weird things, please?
posted by Navelgazer at 3:15 PM on March 12 [11 favorites]

Aren’t they all from comicon because one guy takes a photo and shares it for free?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:24 PM on March 12

Despite the oddly antagonistic framing, the photographers are coming from inside the house.

Led by Wikimedia photographers with support from the Wikimedia Foundation and individual donors.

posted by zamboni at 3:30 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

The existing portraits are fine, and just look like pictures of normal people that a normal person would take. I question the assumption that celebrities are somehow entitled to "better" portraits than ordinary people. As if it's someone's job to do their representation for them, for free? If the celebrity wants a better Wikipedia photo, they're free to submit one!
posted by demonic winged headgear at 3:45 PM on March 12 [18 favorites]

They can literally post their own photo!!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:03 PM on March 12 [11 favorites]

If the celebrity wants a better Wikipedia photo, they're free to submit one!

WP:APoY is a nice essay about the subtleties of doing so.
posted by zamboni at 4:03 PM on March 12 [10 favorites]

If someone downloads one of these photos of a celebrity for use in an advertisement, that person does have the right of publicity.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:22 PM on March 12

“ Kevin and Jenny are constantly trying to find ways to address the diversity blind spots that are in Wikipedia and helping to correct that,” Sarkar said. “We need more high quality portraits of notable figures in the public domain, and of course, most people of color who are notable figures in the public domain are not represented in Wikipedia. It’s not just about photos. The diversity angle is a really important reason why this project is being done.”

This makes a lot of sense as a motivation.
posted by brook horse at 4:41 PM on March 12 [7 favorites]

I question the assumption that celebrities are somehow entitled to "better" portraits than ordinary people.

To reframe this, if you have your own Wikipedia article, you’re theoretically notable. If that’s the same as being a celebrity, then yes, the WikiPortraits folks are going to focus on the people who have articles, and they’re going to conferences and festivals because that’s where you find them.

An effective way to gather freely-licensed photos of notable figures at-scale is to go to where they are!

WikiPortraits was created in order to accomplish this, by hosting events at conferences, festivals, and more to fill this gap. At these events, we sometimes set up a photo booth where anyone with a Wikipedia page—speaker or not—may drop by and have their photo taken. We also send roaming photographers to capture press lines, panels and keynotes.

posted by zamboni at 4:43 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

I mean, these Wikipedia contributors are just people who are proud of the project they work on and who want to make it better. Nothing wrong with that.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:49 PM on March 12 [5 favorites]

I question the assumption that celebrities are somehow entitled to "better" portraits than ordinary people.

I'm an ordinary person and the photos on Wikipedia are often far worse than anything I would consider putting on my Facebook or LinkedIn.

I think it's strictly a matter of wanting to compliment the hard work of the text contributors with better images.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:54 PM on March 12 [3 favorites]

Ha! Ziwe was just pointing out her non-representative portrait to Rosebud Baker!
posted by ishmael at 7:20 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]

The best use of pre-WikiPortraits amateur photography on Wikipedia that I know of is the use of photos from the Muumimaailma/Moomin World theme park in Finland on the 'List of Moomin Characters' page, including my very favorite theme park 'face character' design, Mrs. Fillyjonk, who visually captures the spirit of the character so well you wouldn't BELIEVE.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:28 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]

The existing portraits are fine, and just look like pictures of normal people that a normal person would take.

Oh gosh thank you! I looked at that Instagram feed and was thinking "but....most of these are okay?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:52 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]

The best use of pre-WikiPortraits amateur photography on Wikipedia that I know of is the use of photos from the Muumimaailma/Moomin World theme park in Finland on the 'List of Moomin Characters' page,

The last photo is amazing...not only the characters' expressions, but also the besandalled feet sort of floating there.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 11:48 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]

Ha! Ziwe was just pointing out her non-representative portrait to Rosebud Baker!

I was going to snarkily ask for a time-stamp (who has time to watch an entire 23-minute YouTube video?), but then I ended up watching the whole thing and thoroughly enjoying it. Thank you for your service. <3
posted by flod at 2:36 AM on March 13 [1 favorite]

I'd say that vast majority of these are best described as photographs of people and not portraits of people. The distinction being subtle. Furthermore some of the ones that I think would be recognized as a portrait like Elliot Gould, the image quality is very low.
posted by mmascolino at 6:58 AM on March 13 [1 favorite]

There are a couple wiki articles where an editor used pictures I took at a basketball game and uploaded to flickr under a cc license. Chris Bosh shooting a free throw? Vince Carter arguing with a ref? I took those on a crappy zoom point and shoot camera! I've always gotten a little hoot out of seeing my mediocre photos being used on wiki instead of high quality licensed photos.

And it's not just English wiki. The Catalan article on the New Jersey Nets uses a blurry pic I took of Jason Kidd.

I've stumbled arcoss these randomly, and can see the other uses of the photos once I've clicked through on them. But I've not go idea if any other pics I took have ended up on Wikipedia. Does anyone know if I can search by wiki media by photo author?
posted by thecjm at 7:26 AM on March 13 [4 favorites]

My biggest complaint with the Wikipedia celeb photos, which I guess is sort of tangential to this, is that the featured photo is often very recent — which means, for people who were famous in the 20th century, that it shows them way, way after their heyday, sometimes looking almost unrecognizable to people who would certainly recognize them in an older photo.

Like, if I see a picture of Joan Baez in the 1960s, I know immediately who I'm looking at. If I had a huge brain fart and forgot which person the name "Joan Baez" referred to, a picture of her from the 60s would remind me right away. In fact, even for someone who never really knew who she was, the right picture from the 60s might jog a vague memory in a helpful way: "Oh! Right! She sang at some protest or something! I saw her in that one documentary!"

Seeing a picture of her from 2016, like the one atop her Wikipedia article, is no help at all to anyone, because like it or not, her most memorable moments, the ones whose photographs were most widely distributed, did not happen in 2016.

This vexes me.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 8:43 AM on March 14 [3 favorites]

I, on the other hand, like when they have more recent photos, because it reminds me that these famous people are aging just like I am and maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about that terrible photo I saw of myself the other day.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:50 AM on March 16 [2 favorites]

Wikipedia is often laser focused on a tight head shot it misses the context of the surroundings as a big part of the photo that tells a story about the person. Everyone wants to crop it all out, as if it were a Passport photo. An example: Sam Bankman-Fried #1 and Sam Bankman-Fried #2. The context is a sub-section titled "Incarceration", which describes his time in Jail. Which photo do you think speaks best about his time in Jail? This came up, some people wanted #2.
posted by stbalbach at 10:57 PM on March 16 [1 favorite]