User talk:Future Perfect at Sunrise/Historical portraits

Only historical portraits? Why separate essay?

I support the main intention here to deal with often unencyclopedic, useless and even harmful imaginary depictions of historical people. I have two general remarks about this draft:

1. Only historical people? - Why only historical people? Imaginary depictions of historical events can also often be unencyclopedic, useless and even harmful.
2. Essay or section within MOS? - I think there is no need for such detailed elaboration within an essay when this issue can be perfectly well dealt within MOS. I.e: a separate section within Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images which would contain first two sentences from the lede of this draft and list summarized in General Dos and Don'ts. --Antidiskriminator (talk) 10:36, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. You are right that this could be extended to other historical topics (depictions of historical events, battles etc.). I was already thinking about adding a short section mentioning that.

I don't think this is a proper topic for MOS though. It's a matter of content decisions, not a style issue. (The existing Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images page is really misplaced as it is, but then the whole area of official image policies/guidelines is a mess right now.) But I think it's too specialized and micro-managing for an actual guideline text, so "essay" is probably what it's going to remain. At most, in interested WikiProject such as WikiProject History might one day adopt it and declare it part of its project guidance or something like that. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

You are right that this is about content, not about style. Historical people and other historical things (events, places, objects....) are very important part of wikipedia and their imaginary depictions should be dealt with systematically and consistently. WP:POLICY says: "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." That is why I think that standards how to deal with imaginary depictions of historical people and else (two sentences from the lede of this draft and list summarized in General Dos and Don'ts) should be incorporated into relevant policy (Wikipedia:Image use policy). If detailed best practices for following those standards in specific contexts are necessary, they can be described within separate guideline developed from an essay.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 11:48, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Very interesting

Fut.Perf., thanks for writing this. It makes complete sense and I plan to follow it whenever I work on historical articles. I second Antidiskriminator that you could usefully expand it to cover images of historical events and such. I'm not sure what the bar for moving it to the Wikipedia: namespace is, but I'd definitely support you doing that.—Neil P. Quinn (talk) 23:04, 9 September 2014 (UTC)