Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Are images important?

An article can achieve any status in Wikipedia without images. However, all articles that have passed through higher forms of assessment such as Good Article or Featured Article will usually include an image, as there is a general preference among readers to illustrating articles. Doing so can help break up the text and make it more pleasant on the readers' eyes. Arguably, this has developed from the tradition of miniature in the Western world and similar cultures in other parts of the world.

It is important, however, to remember that images are not limited to photos; diagrams, drawings and maps can also be used. And even for photos they do not have to be limited to famous personalities involved, but may include simple items of the time which were in use during these events and can now be found in museums. The arising problem is that images can clutter whole articles, making them difficult to read. For this reason you should keep the amount of visual help within reasonable amounts. What is reasonable, may differ from topic to topic and should best be obtained by consensus with other editors. Well chosen and well placed images certainly enhance the ability of the reader to understand the article.

Wikipedia aims to be scholarly, preferring references and opinions from academics and their works rather than the relative tattle and sensationalism of newspapers, or lesser sources, such as gossipy or "entertaining" magazines. Please refer MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE.

While newspapers can rely quite heavily on flamboyant photos (as well as catchy headlines) on the front and back pages to rope in potential buyers, this is rarely the case with scholarly historical works, as it is erudition of the scholar and their newly uncovered facts and insights that recommend the publication to the reader and other scholars. Furthermore, while pictures are littered all over the place in newspapers, they are generally few and far between in scholarly books, and are almost entirely non-existent in journal articles.

As the objective of journal articles and scholarly textbooks is to provide new intellectual material and analysis, and as pictures tend to be irrelevant to this (as they are usually not original), the merit of the work—as judged by academic reviews and citations by other scholars—is for all intents and purposes independent of the images. Similarly on Wikipedia, images are by and large not a major determining factor in the merit, rigour, correctness or usefulness of an article.

However, one of the objectives of any written work is to capture the interest of the reader, and to effectively and efficiently impart information. As such, visual aids such as maps, graphs, flow charts, tables and other diagrams can be extremely useful in summarising and visualising information in a way that cumbersome literary descriptions cannot.

While there are many benefits of correctly utilised images, there are also pitfalls to be avoided in utilising images on Wikipedia. While aesthetically pleasing—this, of course, depends on the reader's opinion of the subject of the image—and possibly visually interesting, portraits of people discussed by the article text are generally not necessary and tend to not enhance the reader’s understanding of the subject, as they generally only inform to the reader of the subject's physical appearance, and not what makes them notable, i.e., their policies, achievements, crimes and so forth. If overused they can clutter an article, and potentially overshadow its content. Additionally, licencing can be problematic. One of the core tenets of Wikipedia is the reliance on free content, and with it free images. As a result, photographs of a professional or high-quality amateur standard are often hard to obtain, due to the copyright over them.

See also: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/NPOV images