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Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits [404 Media] (www.404media.co)
submitted 19 hours 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 18 points 14 hours ago

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 6 points 7 hours 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 14 hours ago

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

[-] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 3 points 4 hours 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.

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 8 points 6 hours 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

this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
126 points (100.0% liked)

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