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Profile Pictures - Official, Fanart, and Unrelated

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We’re not Wikipedia. Most people browse that for the purpose of doing research. Meanwhile here people browse after they looked up their one profile. We attract adolescents that want something that’s not bad to look at. Because people don’t always click on just what they know. They click on what attracts them.
 
Generally speaking, what attracts people here is the chance to versus debate, not the chance to look at nice art. We may not be Wikipedia, but you have to realize that Wikia still has guidelines for image use and stuff, right?
 
I strongly believe that we should continue to use fan art when necessary, as long as it is drawn in the manner of the official character designs, and we give credit to the artists whenever we know the sources. It is completely unrealistic to start wiping out the images used in most of our character profile pages, and if they do not look aesthetically pleasing any more, we would lose a large part of our visitors.

It would be to initialise an absolutely massive revision project, not just for no proportionate gain, but for massive loss for the future wellbeing of our community.
 
@AKM sama

Would you be willing to comment here please?
 
I think official art should be first used then the fan-art but if the official has bad quality (resolution or missing parts like text bubbles/pure text or other things that may obscure the character) then a fan-art should be good if it doesn't stray too far from the original. For example, because some characters didn't have any official or fan-art I drawn them myself (tried to add the characteristics which they have shown in the series). This shouldn't be a problem because it falls in the fan-art.

To not let fan-art would mean to verify all profiles and delete all photos that aren't official but how would you know which aren't if nothing is stated on the profile? For some characters (the popular one) this can be easily known but a lot of times fan-art has better or look 1:1 with the official. Would people search through N websites to see if they are official or not? Likely they won't. As long as the art doesn't stray too far away from what it's described (this is likely the case for books/novels) then it should work.

Don't think there should be a problem to use a replacement if the character doesn't have any art be it official or fan-art as long as a note can be put under the photo "This is not an official artwork for the character but it holds the place to help users to envision it." something like this or whatever can be formulated better. Another thing to note is that the photo used shouldn't be on any other character on the wiki so it won't create confusion. This one likely work just on characters that have an appearance mythical beings/characters like a dragon, a behemoth, a snake-man, lion-man, etc.
 
I don't think most of our pages use fanart, and if most of our pages do in fact use fanart, then our unsourced art issue is huge, and demanding of just as big of a revision. Nor do I think most people care so much that they'd just leave.
 
Look, I greatly appreciate you and all of your help over the years, so I definitely mean no disrespect, but what you are suggesting seems extremely unrealistic and destructive to me. We cannot initialise a wiki-wide revision to wipe out all fan art from all pages in the wiki. It would be a nightmare, both in terms of workload that we do not have available, as we need to eventually spend it on the infobox adding project, and other crucial issues, and in terms of aesthetics.

I have placed thousands of hours of work trying to help the wiki look as nice as possible, and many other members have been similarly invested in their favourite fiction pages, so I definitely don't want all of that effort suddenly destroyed.
 
Ant you're not even listening to me at this point. I just said that our workload is the same size by default, because if we have as much fanart as you say we do (doubtful), we have to source all of it. It would, in fact, be easier and faster to get rid of it, given that just by using it, we are opening ourselves up to more trouble - artists getting upset, users changing to other pieces of fanart based on their own personal tastes, inaccurate interpretations of characters getting onto their pages, inappropriate art being circulated and sometimes even put onto character pages...

Don't pull the 'I've put thousands of hours of work' card, either. We're destroying jackshit. Try reading my arguments instead of skipping to the imagined catastrophes, please. I would say aesthetic issues are our last concern when some artists go so far as to threaten legal action over these things. Not that I think that'd amount to much, but if you want to catastrophize, catastrophize with a full understanding of the situation, please.
 
Well, I genuinely think that this would lead to an aesthetical and workload-related disaster, and that using fan art does not seem like a big problem. If an artist contacts us and asks us to remove something, we will quickly do so. It has also only happened once previously that I remember.
 
It is an issue. It's even a potential legal one, though one potentially easily avoided. Using fanart is a problem that brings with it a lot of risks, and if we're gonna use it, the least we should do is ******* source it, just on moral grounds.
 
We also have a wiki maintenance thread for evaluating which character drawings that look good enough to replace already existing ones. It is not a big problem either.
 
Promestein said:
It is an issue. It's even a potential legal one, though one potentially easily avoided. Using fanart is a problem that brings with it a lot of risks, and if we're gonna use it, the least we should do is ******* source it, just on moral grounds.
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I obviously agree with sourcing it whenever we know where it is from, yes.
 
We should really make rules on these image things.

If we don't know where fanart is from, we shouldn't use it.
 
In any case, given that there are likely tens of thousands of fan art images uploaded to the wiki at this point, I just don't find it realistic to wipe them all out.

I can ask our wiki manager Ursuul about the potential legal risks though, but I think that we are simply required to delete images if some artist objects.
 
Promestein said:
We should really make rules on these image things.

If we don't know where fanart is from, we shouldn't use it.
Click to expand...
That might be an idea I suppose.
 
Anyway, I still have a nasty flu and need to go to bed now.
 
I figured a strict no fanart policy wouldn't work, as I mentioned before, but we still need rules. There are very, VERY easy ways to find artists and properly attribute them, and they should be the bare minimum.
 
Using fan art is fine when we don't have good options or the canon art is lacking.

The reason I say we should always source it and get permission, besides it being just the right thing to do, is that using it without permission can very easily lead to legal issues as Prom mentioned. Or at the very least Fandom issues if an artist complains about their work being used without their consent.
 
I agree that attempting to source fanart whenever possible is a good thing to do, and we should attempt to do so whenever we are able. But, Prom, I do not believe it is as big of a deal as you are making it out to be. We have been using fanart on profiles for literal years now, and we barely have had anyone crop up requesting us to remove their work, and even then, it had been being handled with grace and respect whenever we do.

Again, though, sourcing the works is a good idea. We can try to implement something along those lines and bring the original artists the respect they deserve. It would be a massive project, but we can simply gradually add the sources since it isn't that pressing of an issue.
 
On another note, if we are going to give credit to artists and all, can we please do some standard format for it? As manually saying "Credit to X for the art" on every picture (especially on places with too many of them, cough, verse pages, cough) makes us just look poorly in terms of professionalism. Doesn't Fandom has a feature to include on the description of each uploaded file the credit of from where it comes from?
 
You can add descriptions to files, and put credit to the artist there. I prefer doing that as well as crediting the artist under the image, like so. I can see how this wouldn't be very practical with some verse page layouts, but I think in those cases we can bite the bullet on using official art or not using an image.
 
I can tell I missed out on some topics, anyway; while I think the delivery of how Prom mentioned seemed rather blunt or even proposal seemed slightly too drastic, I agree with her points. I do strongly think official art should take priority over fan art whenever possible; I used the battle sprites for most of the Octopath Traveler bosses and NPC characters. And even Undertale profiles should use sprites and the like yes if there's no official art. And as for Novel characters and the like, Harry Potter has mostly images from the movie adaptations, which is close enough to be considered official even if not all characters looked how they were intended in the books.

Characters from Inheritance Cycle actually use art that was either commissioned or made by fans with the intention of pleasing Christopher Paolini; and in which he accepted. So I recall Prom mentioning that the author himself approving a fanart would be considered official and thus no longer "fanart". Example was this image being used in a gallery as well as some potential calculations.
 
Starter_Pack said:
I agree that attempting to source fanart whenever possible is a good thing to do, and we should attempt to do so whenever we are able. But, Prom, I do not believe it is as big of a deal as you are making it out to be. We have been using fanart on profiles for literal years now, and we barely have had anyone crop up requesting us to remove their work, and even then, it had been being handled with grace and respect whenever we do.

Again, though, sourcing the works is a good idea. We can try to implement something along those lines and bring the original artists the respect they deserve. It would be a massive project, but we can simply gradually add the sources since it isn't that pressing of an issue.
Click to expand...
I agree with this, but we have a hard enough time getting enough volunteers to apply our other wiki revisions projects at the moment, and there is also the massive infobox-adding project that is prioritised to apply when we eventually get the opportunity, so this would likely have to be a gradual change, at least currently.
 
Sourcing fan art has literally more work involved than removing it. Sourcing fan art requires to go through every single profile, find out which pictures are fan art, find out the source of who made this fan art, ask them permission, and if you get it go back to the profile and apply it. Or remove it, if it's denied, and find another fan art and repeat the process until something sticks.

Removing fan art just requires removing the picture.

So can we please stop bringing this up as if it's supposed to be a point towards keeping fan art. It isn't. It's fine if it's decided to keep fan art, but if we do keep it we have to source it and it'll be dozens of times more work involved than simply removing it.

And I also don't understand how removing fan art requires a "wiki wide project that will have to overwork our staff and it's impossible to implement" but sourcing fan art can be a "gradual change so it's fine". Either of them will always be a gradual process. There's nothing forcing us to go through every single profile in a day or two if we suddenly decide to change our standards so that we remove fan art from our profiles.
 
Sourcing fan art is fine as a gradual project, as it is wholly constructive.

We could simply write in our rules that if somebody finds unsourced fan art in our profile pages, and know where it is from, they should add a credit to the artist, or ask content moderators or sysops for help if the pages are locked. That is not a big deal.

Removing a massively large part of all images from our profile pages would be wholly massively aesthetically destructive for the wiki and as such a waste of time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere, gradual process or not.

Also, I think that the legal risks are greatly exaggerated here. In the past 7 years, there has been only one instance that I know of where the artist wanted their images removed and deleted, and we instantly complied. That seems like the only thing that might happen.
 
We have written that in our rules, but we could rewrite them to heavily encourage all our members to gradually fix all the cases where we did not know the link to the Deviantart profile or other page of whoever created it, not just insert such links for the images that they insert themselves.

I have unfortunately been far from perfect in this regard myself when helping others insert images to locked pages in the wiki management thread for this, so continuous community help would be very appreciated.
 
Perhaps we could start an ongoing pinned wiki management thread for this purpose?
 
I have received a reply from our wiki manager Ursuul.

"Legal risks shouldn’t be substantial if they’re being used in a manner that constitutes fair use, & if you’re taking them down whenever it’s requested that’s a good way to show good faith.

Making sure to accurately license as much as possible is really the best thing to do."
 
Antvasima said:
Sourcing fan art is fine as a gradual project, as it is wholly constructive.
Click to expand...
Deleting fan art is fine as a gradual project as well and it is wholly constructive for the same reasons.
Antvasima said:
We could simply write in our rules that if somebody finds unsourced fan art in our profile pages, and know where it is from, they should add a credit to the artist, or ask content moderators or sysops for help if the pages are locked. That is not a big deal.
Click to expand...
We could simply write in our rules that if someone finds fan art to just propose to remove it our thread made specifically for profile pictures, or ask a content moderator or sysop to remove it. It's not a big deal either.

Everything you mentioned here for sourcing fan art is the exact same as removing fan art. With the exception that sourcing fan art is a lot more work as well as a legal risk.
Antvasima said:
Removing a massively large part of all images from our profile pages would be wholly massively aesthetically destructive for the wiki and as such a waste of time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere, gradual process or not.
Click to expand...
It's not destructive at all, every single wiki out there doesn't use fan art and they're perfectly fine. Whether we have a pretty picture or not on our profiles will not effect our wiki's standings in the slightest. Removing fan art is as much of a "waste of time and resources" as sourcing is, except, again, sourcing is much more work. With worse gain as it just makes our wiki look unprofessional and puts us at an unnecessary legal risk.
Antvasima said:
Also, I think that the legal risks are greatly exaggerated here. In the past 7 years, there has been only one instance that I know of where the artist wanted their images removed and deleted, and we instantly complied. That seems like the only thing that might happen.
Click to expand...
You are also greatly exaggerating the impact removing fan art would have. You're acting as if removing fan art will collapse the wiki, or that we're forced to make it into such a great endeavour that we have to complete it in a few hours.

People don't come to a wiki called Versus Battle Wiki to look at pretty pictures, they're here to debate whether their fictional character will beat another fictional character. I guarantee you that even if we removed every single picture on the wiki, the wiki won't drop more than a few percent. Stop making it out to be all doom and gloom to something that's an extremely minor aesthetic change.
 
I want the wiki to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible for our 580,000 casual visitors per month, and think that removing most of the images for many of our most popular verses such as Dragon Ball, would severely undermine that after all the massive amounts of work I and others have put into this aspect, and consider what you suggest a far too drastic and inflexible solution.

Again, I am fine with setting up a wiki management thread for gradually sourcing images for ethical reasons, but as Ursuul told us, and we have learned by experience, there really is no ground for legal concerns here, as long as we remove images when the artists request it, so I think that you act like more of a doomsayer than I am in this case.
 
On official art vs fanart: Official when it's nice, fanart is an option otherwise. That's my vote.

I don't really care about the other things, so I'll just go with the majority on those.
 
That's roughly my view as well.
 
Antvasima said:
I want the wiki to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible for our 580,000 casual visitors per month, and think that removing most of the images for many of our most popular verses such as Dragon Ball, would severely undermine that after all the massive amounts of work I and others have put into this aspect, and consider what you suggest a far too drastic and inflexible solution.
Click to expand...
the 580.000 casual visitors will stay even if we remove fan art. There's no reason to believe otherwise. Not to mention that 99% of the fan art will be replaced with official art anyway and won't be just removed entirely. The only scenario where there might be nothing no pictures at all are in the cases of books, which are rare enough on the wiki anyway.
Antvasima said:
Again, I am fine with setting up a wiki management thread for gradually sourcing images for ethical reasons, but as Ursuul told us, and we have learned by experience, there really is no ground for legal concerns here, as long as we remove images when the artists request it, so I think that you act like more of a doomsayer than I am in this case.
Click to expand...
I wasn't the one saying that the whole wiki would collapse because we decided that we were being professional Ant.
 
Ogbun's 100% right, like, again I'm not gonna die on this hill, but our casual visitors don't give a shit, they're not here for art, they're here for stats and versus debating.
 
I was a casual visitor once, and I have to say that while ratings are what they are there for, the first thing someone notices is images. I, for one, like good images and go through each one on a profile when I visit it, and find the profiles without them unappealing. Being aesthetically pleasing only does good.

I don't think the stuff about not using fanarts due to copyright strikes is a very valid argument. Fandom has a team for preventing such things under fair use rules iirc, and how many times has any artist slapped a copyright strike or complained about it to us? If we are featuring their art while crediting them, I don't see an issue.

Not to mention, people do care about images, we can see that with how frequently our users try to change them to look as good as possible.
 
Promestein and Ogbunabali:

My apologies for being blunt, as, again, I greatly appreciate all of your help with managing this community, so I mean no disrespect, but you are factually incorrect in your assumptions.

I asked our wiki manager Ursuul about Fandom's statistics for if visitors prefer images or not in wiki pages, and here is what he replied:

"While we cannot share exact numbers, I can tell you that having images (of any sort) is much preferred by visitors & search engines in particular."

Hence, this would hit our visitor statistics very hard if we went through with it, both due to that our search engine prioritisation would fall drastically, and due to that our visitors would not enjoy their stay if, for example, they wouldn't see any nice looking images of what the Dragon Ball characters look like.

Visual aesthetics are important, as are proper organisation and reliability/accuracy. We have to focus on gradually improving all three areas in order to earn the loyalty of our visitors, which I have tried my best to help with over the years.
 
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I really don't get your obsession with constantly improving for visitors that have been coming and staying for a worse website for years.
 
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