User:Wnt/Featured picture ads

For a living person to be chosen as Wikipedia's featured picture is clearly quite a compliment, often seeming at once to suggest both their special importance and personal attractiveness. Much the same can be said for commercial products. Both might expect some increase in web traffic from any such appearance, making it well worth their while financially to encourage the taking of very high quality professional photographs. For the purpose of articles, this is not a problem - we want celebrities to get great quality photos taken that we can use to illustrate them, and often they don't. However, the purpose of featured pictures is not to promote people, but to promote topics of interest to our readers.

A good featured image invites the reader to learn more, but Categories like Featured pictures/People/Entertainment include too many blah-blah who-cares images that it is hard to picture anyone seriously wanting to follow up on, like File:StephenMerchantAltNov09.jpg, a profile image submitted by a publicist.

Sometimes the issue is as much caption as image. Featured product photos (for example Template:POTD/2013-04-29 and several others in Featured pictures/Photographic techniques, terms, and equipment) appear beside captions specifically touting the features of the product, rather than an explanation of the techniques used to make a good product photo. Likewise entertainer shots appear besides biographies, not explanations of how a fashion model shoot works or the technical description for the type of pose or makeup used. The net effect is that they appear as commercial ads on the Main Page.

To be sure, there can be photos of living persons which are actually worth POTDing, if they happen to present the best example of illustrating some class of activity like gymnastics, fashion or international politics, compared to all other images of all other people who might be involved. But the Featured picture criteria should not be abused. Specifically, criterion 3 "among the best examples of a given subject that the encyclopedia has to offer" should be taken to refer to images of people or products as a whole, not images of a specific person. This is only to be fair to nature photographers who can't count on guaranteed approval of a specific population of a specific species of insect because nobody else has illustrated it. Criterion 7, requiring description of the specific context, should be interpreted as I suggest above, to involve description of the overall kind of activity involved (if there's anything special about it at all) rather than a biography of the individual featured.