Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/September 27, 2023

image selection


i am wondering if any of the images at right (the second and third being versions of the first, cropped via CSS image crop) would be more appropriate for the blurb than the one currently being used. the current image is of a fusilier of one of the french revolutionary armies. the army of sambre and meuse was a french revolutionary army, but the current image does not appear to depict a fusilier specifically of the army of sambre and meuse. on the other hand, the images at right specifically depict the army of sambre and meuse. i wasn't sure if this image was overlooked due to being not so clear at the small thumbnail size, which is why i provided a couple of mockups of how a closer crop might look.pinging (fac nominator) and  (tfa coordinator for this month). dying (talk) 03:07, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Nice work. - Dank (push to talk) 03:29, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * and, i wasn't sure if either of you were waiting for a response from , but if so, i thought i might note that the fac nominator appears to have made only one edit in the last year, around two months ago. dying (talk) 23:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Is there a US PD tag that applies? Do we know this was published pre-1928? Wehwalt (talk) 00:53, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
 * oh, that is a good point. since the image had gone through the fac process, and the caption in the article mentions that it is an illustration from the 1870s, i had assumed that the image was free to use.  looking a little closer, i see that the image description states that the illustration is from around 1880, and that it was created by édouard detaille, a french painter who died in 1912.  the source of the image doesn't appear to state where the illustration was taken from.the article on detaille mentions that "[h]e was regarded as the 'semi-official artist of the French army and that "[h]e published a book called L'Armée Française in 1885, which contains over 300 line drawings and 20 color reproductions of his works".  although i was unable to find a copy of this book, i did find images of some of the color reproductions, such as this one provided on this page.  notice that the colouring is much more detailed and lifelike than that found in the image at right.  i also stumbled upon this uncoloured version of the image at right, which makes me wonder if the illustration was originally a line drawing, and someone else later added color to the image.  if so, then even if the line drawing had been published during detaille's lifetime, it appears to be unclear what the copyright status of the subsequent colouring is, so it may be better to not use the image at right in the blurb.  (as an aside, the uncoloured version appears to have a more legible date: 1888.  this means that the caption in the article is likely incorrect.)looking more closely at the image currently being used in the blurb, i see that it appears to have been drawn by Tan Khaerr, an editor who has uploaded a number of other drawings of french soldiers, so the provenance of that image seems more clear.  the description on commons suggests that the coloured version of the detaille illustration was used as source material, but it turns out that that information was apparently added by the fac nominator, so i am not sure how Tan Khaerr determined the colors used in the uniform.  in any case, aside from the colouring, the uniform in Tan Khaerr's drawing appears to be similar to those in the detaille illustration, so i assume that it is accurate enough to represent the army of sambre and meuse.apologies for the delayed response.  it took me a while to figure out the above.  dying (talk) 22:44, 26 September 2023 (UTC)