Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-03-22/Essay - Wikipedia

This is an essay on Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. You may edit this page at Wikipedia:Unusual biographical images but not on The Signpost.

This page in a nutshell: While turning an unillustrated article into an illustrated one is undoubtedly an important task, editors should use common sense when doing so for articles about living people: Consider not adding extremely low-quality or otherwise questionable biographical images.

English Wikipedia's policies on copyrights and image use mean that we can only use own-work, freely-licensed, or public-domain images in articles, and can only use copyrighted images under Wikipedia's special and very strict (stricter than the law) non-free content criteria. Not only are these criteria strict, photographs of living people typically also fail the separate "unacceptable use" guidelines, which act like a redundancy layer to make it extra certain that non-free images of living people are not used.

Copyrighted photographs of living people generally fail already at the first non-free content criterion: "No free equivalent". It states that where a free equivalent could be created, a non-free photograph of a living person may not be used, because in most cases, a photograph of a living person can be taken and released under a free licence. This is based simply on the fact that the person is living. "Unacceptable use" guidelines include the provision against using non-free pictures of people still alive ...; provided that taking a new free picture as a replacement (which is almost always considered possible) would serve the same encyclopedic purpose as the non-free image (WP:NFC#UULP), and the provision against using a photo from a press agency or photo agency ..., unless the photo itself is the subject of sourced commentary in the article (WP:GETTY), which is especially relevant for celebrities.

At the same time, there is a very strong desire by editors to add images to articles, and many editors see it as an "easy way to improve the encyclopedia". This aligns with the idealized progression scheme for each article: According to the guideline for assessing the quality of a Wikipedia article, even "Start-class" articles need to either include an image or have some other very basic feature expected of any article, and "Good articles" are required to have an image (unless it is impossible to obtain one). Consequently, editors almost never agree that no image is better than at least some image, and in biographies, adding the subject's photo as the lead image is particularly seen as a top priority. To this end, contributors will take photographs of notable living subjects themselves, or come up with free images of living subjects in some roundabout way, such as by cropping a freely licensed or public-domain image in which the article subject is not the main subject.

Because of this, we occasionally end up with some peculiar and questionable biographical photos. The phenomenon is inherent to articles about living people, because the perverse incentive discussed in the previous paragraphs attaches to an assumption that a living person could be photographed, but in some aspects it extends to articles about dead people as well. These unusual biographical images may be low in visual quality, taken from afar, a non-facial angle or show their subject in a unique situation ...sometimes a very unique situation. All of the photos included below are either in use or were previously in use on English Wikipedia. Feel free to add more.

And if there's an article about you, and you don't like the picture (or there is none), what should you do? See our handy guide, "A photo of you".

Academia

Sports

Basketball

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  Jon Pollock

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Football

Other

Politics

Politicians

Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards

For several members of the Ba'ath Party, the only freely-available images are from the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards set produced by the U.S. Government. Some of these cards contain no photographs at all, with generic silhouettes being used to illustrate the subjects.

Other

Visual arts

Entertainment

Film and television

Internet

Music

Other

Biographical images that are unusual but also highly justified

The following images depict the subject in a peculiar pose, state, or situation, or while performing a particular activity they are known for, either of which is either tied to the reason why the subject is notable, and/or there is a meaningful link between the given peculiar aspect of the photograph and the article's prose. Such images are therefore significant and relevant in the topic's context and look like what they are meant to illustrate. They may also be of fairly high quality (but not necessarily).