Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Images/archivetalk

For some reason this page was nominated for deletion. Instead, let's discuss how to improve style guidelines for images, and how they are organized.

Commons has its own style guidelines for uploads of media. Wikipedia has a few narrow areas in which there are guidelines for appropriate/good images --
 * 1) in the standards set for Featured Images,
 * 2) in ad-hoc standards of different topical projects about which images they want to have in infoboxes
 * 3) in ad-hoc standards of different articles and how to determine what other images from a related gallery are included in the lede and in the article
 * 4) in certain classes of popular articles (about celebrities with 'official' headshots, about published media with official [cover-]art)
 * 5) when fair use images are appropriate (some overlap with cover and poster art above)
 * 6) when images of living people are appropriate (who needs to give their consent to the use of their image)
 * 7) how to respond to authors or subjects of photos who request removal (when not covered above; for instance, an artist who may or may not have sanctioned a third-party to post their media to flickr under a free license; or a star who requests removal of an image out of courtesy)
 * 8) how to position images on a page (what to do with infoboxes, how to align width with infobox width, alternating down the page)
 * 9) what to do with galleries and how to include or link them from pages (separate from the question of how to name and sort the images on commons)

Only some of the above are covered in MoS pages or sections. Two sections are transcluded on this page, a few other points are linked to in the introduction. –SJ + 16:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

More to be said
There is much more to be said and done with images -- when is an image a better desription than text? When should an image be sought out or requested? What sorts of guidelines for "balanced" or "representative" images are appropriate, for different categories of articles? What tradeoffs should be made between informational detail and beauty or clarity? How should attribution be assigned to an image with many sources and participants? When is a diagram better than a photograph? What are the ideal uses of map segments, aerial photos, and blueprints? The best ways to annotate an image?

There are more interesting questions for videos and animations. a topic that has received almost no MoS attention at all (due to historical lack of support for rich media in MediaWiki; the irony!).

–SJ + 16:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You maybe interested in Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(icons) . Transcluding is not allowed in the MoS so i've removed that Gnevin (talk) 17:34, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Legal issues
IMO, to keep the style guide from being too lengthy, rules issues regarding the legalities of image usage should be proposed and added to wikipedia policies, not style guides. Policies explain and describe standards that all users should normally follow, while guidelines are meant to outline best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Oicumayberight (talk) 00:13, 18 March 2011 (UTC)