Talk:Palouse, Washington

Article images

@Magnolia677 This article was recently edited to include an image contributed to Wikimedia Commons through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Wikimedia Commons pipeline. This preserves provenance & ownership of the original document as well as its copyright status. You have repeatedly swapped out this image for your own version which appears to have been downloaded, edited, and re-uploaded. You have stated that this image is a higher quality image, but in fact it is not. Your edit undermines a large-scale effort by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) to include their content in Wikipedia while simultaneously tracking its use so as to justify this sharing. NWDH (talk) 19:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Your photo

My photo

@NWDH: When you uploaded this file, you tagged it as "public domain" with "no copyright". If you or your employer don't want people downloading your files and improving them, then stop uploading them to the Commons. You have no copyright on this photo from 1907. None. Zero. Zilch. Moreover, MOS:IMAGEQUALITY states: "Use the best quality images available".

Look at this image uploaded by DPLA to the Commons:

If an editor wanted to add that photo to a Wikipedia article, should they leave it sideways (and preserve the "provenance & ownership of the original document"), or do you think maybe it could be manipulated a bit so it looks better for readers?

As a courtesy, I have added to this article a link to the Commons image galleries, when readers can view your image and those contributed by others. Magnolia677 (talk) 22:10, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

@Magnolia677The original panoramic image is the best quality image available. It is true to the original historic document. Heavily Photoshopping photos as you've done changes their character and their value as primary source material for researchers. This is not a question of copyright (of course anyone may edit the photo as they see fit for their own personal or commercial uses), but a question of trust (i.e., Wikipedia's reputation as a trustworthy resource).

I believe that this level of image editing is a violation of the Editing Images section of MOS. These edits are inappropriate for historical photographs. At the very least you should include a caption that mentions all of your edits, e.g., "Removed photograph text (caption), joined sections of photo, sharpened image, cropped image, altered color from original."

Merely rotating an image as you mention would of course not be a problem. NWDH (talk) 18:00, 25 October 2022 (UTC)