Find that face, name that thon

Question

As I was working up the report for one of the surnames I was working on last month, something became depressingly clear: there are an awful lot of profiles on WikiTree that don't have images of the person the profile is about.

Here's (part of) what I wrote:

The percentage of profiles from ThePeerage.com that link to that person's entry dropped from 41.9% to 34.2% during February. The percentage of profiles from Wikipedia that link to the article about that person dropped from 77.8% to 76.4%. That wasn't because links are being removed, but because I'm trying to stick to my plan of tallying first, and then going back to fix profiles with issues once I have finished tallying. So, since none of the profiles that I tallied last month had links back to their sources, the averages went down. If you want to know how to add a link to Wikipedia, there are instructions on how to do that in the "Goals" section of the Notables Project page.

The percentage of profiles from ThePeerage.com with images on them decreased from 7% to 5.4% last month. The percentage of profiles from Wikipedia with images also decreased from 21.6% to 21.3%. (This is also due to newly-tallied profiles lacking images.) The number of profiles from our family tree with images stubbornly remains at 0%.

Now, generally speaking, a profile with an image on it is going to attract more attention than one that doesn't. In this respect, Wikipedia is sort of like a dating site: if you don't put a picture on your profile, you're not going to get as many people expressing interest in you.

Whether getting less attention to your profile on a dating site is a good thing or a bad thing would depend on how good that site is at filtering out predators, creeps, and weirdos. (Don't get me wrong: I am a huge fan of weirditude. But there's a big difference between being entertainingly weird, and being frighteningly weird. I prefer to think of myself as entertainingly weird.)

But in the case of WikiTree, the hardware is bought, the domain name is registered, and the hamsters that power the servers are fed by money that WikiTree gets by attracting people who are not (yet) WikiTreers to the site and showing them ads. Therefore, it is in the best interest of those who would like to see WikiTree stick around that every profile on the site (and the site as a whole) be as attractive as possible. Or, to put it another way, we need WikiTree to be what marketers call "sticky".

Now different people are attracted by different things:

• Some people just ask "which site lists the most people?" on the assumption that they're most likely to find their own family on the biggest site. (That's a reasonable rule of thumb, but it could also happen that the most complete mapping of a particular family is actually on a smaller site where a close relative has been particularly active.) WikiTree isn't the biggest family tree yet, but we are growing.
• Some people want to know which site is the most accurate. They're probably still interested in finding their own family, but they want to know that they can trust that what they see on the site is actually, you know, true. Now, we have any number of projects that are all about improving the accuracy of the data on WikiTree, and I applaud them and am cheering on everybody who is doing their part to help in that. It's one of the many things I love about WikiTree.
• Some people see a news item, history book, encyclopedia, or something similar that talks about a notable person who has the same surname as they, someone else in their family, or even one of their friends have, and then they wonder "is this person related"? Going to Wikipedia or a similar site almost certainly won't answer that question. Coming to WikiTree might, because of the efforts of the Notables Project. (I know, they still have lots of notables to add, but their focus on adding, improving, and connecting the profiles of notables probably has a bigger impact on WikiTree's income than anybody knows.)
• Lots of people probably drop by because they see something about WikiTree on social media, so all of you who are sharing, commenting, liking, etc. on social media sites are definitely helping the cause.
• And I'm sure that some people drop by because they're using a search engine to find information about their families, and a WikiTree profile comes up as a hit. (And that, in turn, leads us back to the number of profiles, because the more profiles we have -- at least open ones -- the more likely one of those profiles is going to come up as a hit in a web search for a particular name and date.)

But, all of that said, it's better, once somebody hits WikiTree in the first place, if they find something that attracts/interests them enough that they stick around and explore other pages besides the one they originally hit, because every page load means more ads, and more ads means more Purina Hamster Chow.

(Of course, the ultimate goal is to attract more people to join WikiTree and help out, because in trying to have a profile for every person born since 1 AD, we have bitten off way more than we can chew, even with the thousands of WikiTreers we have now. If we ever hope to do the job even the beginnings of a lick and a promise, we need millions of WikiTreers, not just thousands. But even if somebody never joins, the more they come to WikiTree and look around, the more they help, in their own way, to ensure that WikiTree survives.)

All of which boils down to this:

1. People tend to find profiles with pictures of the person the profile is about more interesting than profiles that don't.
2. The more interesting each profile is, the more likely people are to keep exploring the site and be shown more ads.
3. The number of profiles which actually have images is pretty low. In my surname research, I have tallied 1,288 open profiles from Wikipedia, ThePeerage.com, and my watchlists. Of those, 269 (20.9%) have images. Which means that a visitor hitting a random profile out of that set would have slightly better than a one in five chance of hitting a profile with an image. (Granted, that's not a random survey of WikiTree as a whole, but I suspect that the surnames I'm studying probably have a higher incidence of images than WikiTree as a whole, since I have been adding images to those profiles where I can.)
4. Therefore, it seems to me that a "thon" kind of event could definitely help WikiTree be "stickier", and therefore more stably funded. (With the added benefit of potentially attracting more people to join.) Granted, we have had "Scan-a-Thons" in the past, and those have undoubtedly helped the situation, at least in the case of the family trees of WikiTreers who had photos to scan (and scanners). But those thons left out all of the profiles for which public domain images are available on the internet (in Wikimedia Commons and other locations), rather than having photos in the possession of WikiTreers. So probably tens of thousands of profiles of notables or people who made the news long enough ago for images of them to be in the public domain weren't eligible to have images added to them.

Therefore, I would like to propose that we put together some kind of challenge or thon or other event to encourage WikiTreers to add images of the person a profile is about to that profile wherever they can. The image can be a photo of the person, or a photo or scan of a painting, sketch, woodcut, statue, or similar representation of that person. (Images like scans of documents, or photos of the person's house, etc. are good to have, but don't really replace an image of the person when it comes to interestinghoodnessiditydom, so I would say that they shouldn't earn points in this particular case.)

Comments

Then, of course, the question becomes what to name such an event. Some possibilities have already occurred to me, but almost certainly, somebody else would have better ideas:

• Face-a-Thon (FAT) - probably leads to unpleasant thoughts
• Image-a-Thone (IAT) - probably likely to make people ask "How do you pronounce that?"
• Picture-a-Thon (or Photo-a-Thon) - is that too PAT an answer?
• Find-a-Face (FAF) - also not a word, so the acronym isn't as fun
• Find-an-Image (FAI) - ditto
• Find-a-Photo (or Find-a-Picture) - I am so not going there
• Quest for Face - like the movie Quest for Fire, only not
• IMAGEination - not even clear that this would convey anything to anybody, but it occurred to me

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I would only be in favor of such a "thon" if the images added are in the public domain and free of copyright. Such images are actually hard to come by.

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Since it's a WikiTree rule that images have to be in the public domain, that rule would be part of the challenge as a matter of course.

But you would be astonished at how many public domain images there are available:

• Most (not all) of the images on Wikipedia are either public domain or licensed under Creative Commons. If you click on an image and then click on the "More details" button, you'll see the copyright status, different resolutions available, and so on. You can also search on Wikimedia Commons (which is the site you end up on when you click the button) for other images of the same person, even if they're not used on the Wikipedia article for that person. When I work on adding photos for notables, they're on Wikimedia Commons maybe half the time, so there are a ton of images available just for the surnames I'm working on, but I haven't gotten around to them yet.
• Lots of archive sites have photos of notable people from the area that archive covers. Many archives just admit that anything taken by a photographer who has been dead for 70 years or longer is in the public domain, but some (like the BC Archives, grrrr!) claim a "compilation copyright". (Although this sort of thing has been struck down in different courts.)
• Some months ago, I seem to recall somebody posting a link to a news item about some large organisation (possibly the New York Public Library?) putting up a web site with thousands of public domain photographs from their collection.
• Also note that every photo taken by an employee of the government of the United States of America in the course of their work for the government is automatically in the public domain, so piles of photos of politicians, military personnel, scientists, government officials, and so on are available that way.
• In addition, publicists for film studios or record labels frequently release publicity photos of actors, directors, singers, musicians, and so on, so anybody working on profiles for entertainers usually has a wealth of photos to choose from.

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Thanks for this info, Greg. I agree, it should be easier to find an image of a "notable" which is in the public domain. 

Regardless of WikiTree's rules and the policies of other genealogy websites, I have seen many instances here and on other genealogy sites where people have taken images from Find a Grave and posted them on here or Ancestry.com, for example, or where they have done the opposite--without permission or attribution. Too many genealogists do not feel that copyright rules should apply to them. As long as images are free of copyright/in the public domain or as long as participating WikiTreers have permission to use images which are copyrighted or owned by others and provide proper attribution, I have no problem with such an "image-a-thon" here on WikiTree.

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Further news:

While I was searching for that post about that news story about that large collection of photos, I came across a reference to this page:

Galleries and Collections which have given Permission for use of Images

Thanks to Michael Cayley for putting together such a useful resource!

Answer 1

I remember having a "Scan-a-thon" in 2018.

Answer 2

You and I are very much in sync here. I think "notables" are a great way to attract people to the site who may not (yet) be family historians, but who are simply interested in learning more about a famous personality. Our genealogical focus can provide researchers with a biographical perspective unavailable anywhere else. Without illustrations, however profiles can look rather drab and boring. A "beautfied" profile with proper images, formatting, headers, stickers, etc., helps to make our site look professional, adds a sense of credibility, and hopefully encourages people to explore further.

If you can get a thon going, I'll be there.

Comments

Oh, I am absolutely not organising this. I already have far more things to maintain on Wikipedia than I have time to maintain them as it is. (If about a dozen of the "Can you help connect..." or "Quest for Great-Grandparents" challenges actually got completed, it might be a different story.) This time, I plan to cheer from the sidelines, not lead the parade. Although I will definitely take part, looking for images to add to the notables from my surname studies.

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Let me amend my statement:

If you can find somebody to get a thon going, I'll be there.

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I'd clone you, if I could. I've been watching your projects with admiration, and not a little envy. But I can't imagine you adding to your already scary workload.

Answer 3

I don't have any good ideas for names, but I also remember the Scan-A-Thon that Judi mentions.  I even have the t-shirt!

Maybe the number of images will increase somewhat through the year, as there is a specific line item for adding photos in the 15 for 15, 30 for 30 and 45 for 45 challenge going on through 2023.  Probably more hope there than reality , as I know I have created a number of profiles in the last 2 months for which I have absolutely no photos.

Comments

Oh, right. We must have T-shirts. If there aren't T-shirts, the event never happened.

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Funny.

Answer 4

Greg a question; Are you talking about notables or all profiles?

I have many hundreds of pics of ancestors back to when photography was still newish, and many to scan, only a few ancestors are notable.

Nelda is right images in the public domain can be few and hard to find.

Comments

People scanning their own family photos helps to make WikiTree more attractive, just like adding photos of notables. But putting up photos from places like Wikimedia Commons was not allowed in the Scan-a-Thons. My vision is to allow and encourage both. Any image (as long as it's not copyrighted) is an improvement. (Well, okay, probably not finger-paint pictures of my family that I did in kindergarten.)

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Hmmm... that last gag about fingerprints got me thinking. Quite aside from this challenge idea to find images for profiles that lack them, the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to encourage people to create images for profiles.

Imagine, if you will, a recently deceased person who had such a tight grip on their public relations that there are no photos of them in the public domain, and won't be any for decades. All the photos that have ever been taken of that person are copyrighted, and the copyright is protected by rabid packs of lawyers who are only released from their cages to feed on heedless genealogists.

But people can't copyright something they didn't create. So if somebody creates an original representation of that person, nobody can sue over it. And there's no limit to what medium a person could use, as long as it's possible to take a photo or scan of it.

Has anybody ever used fingerpaint as a serious artistic medium? What about Pla-Doh? Macaroni?

Imagine a bust of our hypothetical subject formed out of sand on a beach. (Just get the photo before the tide comes in!)

Maybe cross-stitch. Origami?

I think people could have a lot of fun with this. That is, people who are artistic. I can't even draw a straight line, so we'll just save everyone from having to look at anything I create, okay?