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.

  • FundMECFS
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    6 hours ago

    I know we do. I’ve got thousands of wikipedia edits.

    And it often isn’t as easy as just editing unfortunately. A lot of pages have overprotective people watching the changelog trying to shelter their pet theories/biases.

    • coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.orgOP
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      6 hours ago

      seems strange for you to criticize the quality of Wikipedia, then? you have personal experience that demonstrates why these volunteers are putting their time towards this instead of towards editing articles - editing articles is a difficult and sometimes contentious process.