This mosaic of Saturn's moon Titan, taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2004, "constitutes the most detailed full-disc view of the mysterious moon". It is a featured picture at English Wikipedia, but on 1 June 2009 an editor nominated this image for delisting.And that delisting nomination, along with the reasoning that led to it, could harm Wikipedia for years to come. It's a shortsighted trend that needs to be stopped.
This was the nominator's rationale:
Noisy, lack of detail, improper focus(?), areas of focus varying.The first response elaborated:
Delist Woah, that is pretty rough. The stitching is also kind of obvious, especially with the error at the edge of the globe at about the WNW position. The sharp edge is also unrealistic and distracting. Is that a natural background or did NASA just replace with a single black?In response, another commenter suggested:
If you read the page description, it says that NASA has processed the image to sharpen the surface details.This has led to a lively debate about featured picture standards. On one side:
Delist - Agree this would make a better VP than FP. Technical quality is low - stitching errors, pixelated edges, inconsistent sharpness, grainy, etc. The EV is extremely high though.On the other:
Keep This image is not easily reproducable. There is a lack of images of titan, possibly one of the more important bodies in this solar system. And this is currently the best composite image of the whole surface. Please do some reading up on the FPC guidelines. They are there to read, understood and applied, not to be simply ignored.The issue here is whether esthetics take priority over encyclopedic value in the site's featured pictures. And with that debate rests the fate of the site's relatively new valued pictures program. Encyclopedic value has always been an important consideration at featured pictures and can highly encyclopedic images get priority over esthetics according to the official featured picture criteria, but that's on the verge of changing. From a related nomination to de-feature the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki:
Maybe its time we "demote" some of our lower-quality FPs and fill up VPC with them... We aren't doing harm; maybe this will be a saving grace for the VPC program.Actually that would a great deal of harm: featured pictures get a turn on Wikipedia's main page. Valued pictures don't. That makes a big difference to the team of volunteers are negotiating with museums and archives internationally to improve access to encyclopedic images. To a museum curator, the chance of a turn on Wikipedia's main page is a golden opportunity: approximately 7 million views per day. That is very persuasive in opening doors and in obtaining large content donations to WMF of many thousands of images.
Put it this way: if you were talking to a Japanese historic archive, wouldn't it be a lot more persuasive to show them the mushroom cloud as a featured picture, and explain that if they released their collection too then their country's perspective--the destruction that actually occurred on the ground--could get equal attention on Wikipedia's main page?
The valued pictures program, which receives no main page attention, is a bureaucratic process that harms Wikipedia by hindering negotiations to gain encyclopedic content. Valued pictures has been nominated for deletion. Both Gerard Meijssen (chairman of the Open Progress Foundation) and Joseph Seddon (a board member of Wikimedia UK) have endorsed the deletion nomination. Meijssen and Seddon are both part of the international volunteer network that is working to open the doors at more image archives.
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