Submissions:2025/Content Gaps: Professional Photography, Family Photos
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Content Gaps: Professional Photography, Family Photos
Type of session:
- Lecture (15-30 min)
Session theme(s):
- Missing pieces
Abstract:
As I started culling 25 years' worth of professional assignments down to a manageable volume to leave to my children, I noticed that many of the people and events that I had photographed (for the Associated Press, The New York Times, Forbes, and People Magazine) had Wikipedia pages but most of those pages had few photos and some had none at all. No pages showed Mike Tyson boxing or Jimmy Carter building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and there were no photos at all for Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie or Sports Illustrated editor Jule Campbell - so I started to upload my photos to those pages.
After a while, I realized that there very few professional photographers who were uploading their photos to Wikipedia (because of licensing concerns, authorship credit, and complex upload process). In this presentation, I'll show my photos, my process, and the results, and together with the audience, we'll consider whether there's more that the Wikipedia community could do to support professional photographers.
I have also recently extended my Wikipedia efforts to include uploading family photos when they're relevant to a particular Wikipedia page. Like professional photographers, family historians have their own hurdles to face. Some photos might not fit neatly into the Creative Commons categories that Wikimedia provides.
It seems like professional photos and family photos are two rich sources of content and they also represent content gaps that are worth filling.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=50&user=BillCramer
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=50&user=CommonHistory
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-cramer/ https://www.billcramer.com/ https://wonderfulmachine.com/
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- BillCramer, CommonHistory
Affiliated organization(s):
- Bill Cramer Photography, Wonderful Machine, Common History
Estimated length of session
- 15 minutes plus Q&A
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- no
Special requests:
- It would be nice to be able to connect my laptop to a screen so I can show photos and web pages.