Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos

Some may wonder: Could there be a bad picture of Halle Berry or George Clooney?

Just visit Wikipedia. There you’ll find a fuzzy shot of Ms. Berry from the mid-1980s, when she was part of a U.S.O. tour with other Miss USA contestants. She is out of focus and wearing a red-and-white baseball cap — in short, she is barely recognizable. Mr. Clooney, in his Wikipedia entry, is shown in Chad wearing a khaki vest and a United Nations cap. Smiling, he is ruggedly handsome in the company of two women who work for the United Nations; still this is hardly a glamour shot.

Then there are big names like Howard Stern or Julius Erving who have no photograph at all on Wikipedia.

At a time when celebrities typically employ a team of professionals to control their images, Wikipedia is a place where chaos rules. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto this site. This is because the site runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited.

“Representatives or publicists will contact us” horrified at the photographs on the site, said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia encyclopedias in more than 200 languages. “They will say: ‘I have this image. I want you to use this image.’ But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.”

“In general,” he added, “we need them to know that giving us a photograph from Annie Leibovitz won’t work unless Annie Leibovitz is O.K. with it.”

Photographs are a glaring flaw in the Wikipedia model. Unlike the articles on the site, which in theory are improved, fact checked, footnoted and generally enhanced over time, photographs are static works created by individuals. A bad article can become a better article. A bad photograph simply stays bad.

Wikipedians have tried to make up for this defect by organizing outings where groups of contributors take high-quality photographs of buildings or objects. Likewise Wikipedia has tried to gain permission from large photographic collections to use their material.

Last winter the German Federal Archives released 100,000 low-resolution digital copies under a license so they could appear on Wikipedia. Recently a Wikipedia user, Derrick Coetzee, downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution photographs from the British National Portrait Gallery — to serve, in essence, as the head shots for important historical figures like Charlotte Brontë or Charles Darwin.

The gallery threatened legal action against Mr. Coetzee, saying that while the painted portraits may be old and thus beyond copyright protection, the photographs are new and therefore copyrighted work. The gallery is demanding a response by Monday from Mr. Coetzee, who is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In an e-mail message on Friday a gallery spokeswoman, Eleanor Macnair, wrote that “contact has now been made” with the Wikimedia Foundation and “we remain hopeful that a dialogue will be possible.”

But none of this has made much of an improvement in Wikipedia’s photography. Any gallery of hideous Wikipedia photographs would include the former N.B.A. star George Gervin, who is standing stiffly in a suit in a shot that is cropped longer and thinner than would be typical even for a basketball player. The unrestricted photograph came from the office of Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has been cut out of it.

As in Mr. Gervin’s case, the government is a prime source for public domain photographs. President Obama, for example, looks composed and serious in the official portrait that sits on the upper right-hand corner of his article.

But Wikipedia contributors also cull government collections for photographs of celebrities’ meetings with politicians, hoping to find something to post on the page.

The former home-run king Hank Aaron is shown in an out-of-context, oddly cropped photograph from a 1978 visit to the White House. Likewise the main photograph of Michael Jackson was taken from his 1984 visit with Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Recent photographs on Wikipedia almost exclusively are the work of amateurs who don’t mind giving away their work. Amateur may be too kind a word; their photos tend to be the work of fans who happen to have a camera. The opera singer Natalie Dessay is shown looking the wrong way at an autograph signing; the actress Allison Janney appears in sunglasses at the Toronto Film Festival. The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are seen from middle distance at Cannes in 2001, with Ethan covering his mouth, perhaps because he has just coughed.

Then there are the photographs taken from the stands, with the subject barely a fleck. Barry Bonds is apparently the outfielder in the center of one photograph on his page; David Beckham can be discerned with his hands on hips during a 1999 soccer match.

A few celebrities, like Plácido Domingo and Oliver Stone, have had the foresight to provide their own freely licensed photographs. And considering the money that stars spend to maintain their image, it is surprising that more have not invested in high-quality, freely licensed photographs for Wikipedia and other sites. Perhaps they don’t recognize how popular Wikipedia is. In June, for example, Ms. Berry’s article had more than 180,000 page views.

Also, it can be difficult to persuade a talent photographer to go along with that approach because one free photograph can drive out all the others, said Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. He is unusual in that he has contributed about a dozen low-resolution photographs to Wikipedia, including a shot of the actor Mark Harmon, originally created for TV Guide.

In an interview Mr. Avenaim still sounded torn about the idea of contributing his work. He said he was trying to accomplish two goals: “One, I really wanted to help the celebrities that I care about to show them in the proper light they want to be shown,” he said. “Second, it is an interesting marketing strategy for myself.”

He said that having his work on Wikipedia has increased his online visibility as reflected in search-engine results and traffic to his Web site,, but that the costs are potentially high. “This is the lifeblood of my career,” he said, noting that photographers may get paid very little for a celebrity shot for a magazine. They make their money from resales of the image. And even a low-resolution photograph that is available free — say, his shot of Dr. Phil — becomes the default photograph online and means there is no need to pay for another one of his shots.

That, ultimately, is the issue for photographers who might want to donate their work to Wikipedia, but not the entire Internet.

“To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,” Mr. Avenaim said. “If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.”