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I used to take and supply my own photos or searched for photos for my articles until I found that they were being replaced with artist renderings of what the artist thought the step was about (not the photo itself).  I was actually so disappointed that many of the articles I wrote became less clear with perfectly fine photos being replaced by seemingly cartoon-like drawings -  that I stepped back from writing for a while. I see some new things happening here that are encouraging, but I do not know if the practice of replacing photos with drawings has stopped or not and didn’t feel like slogging around to find the policy.  So, are we waiting for WH illustrators to interpret our thoughts of the step we wrote - or are actual photos from the author welcomed again?  I don’t want to waste my time carefully selecting or taking and editing photos if they’re going to be replaced.

Thanks!  

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@Stevecon Thanks for reaching out about this. The wikiVisual project has been through many evolutions at this point, and while that path has lead things to a pretty good place, not every article along the way has hit the right mark, particularly on handy topics - I’m sorry some of those have disappointed you. If there are still ones out there now on topics you started that aren’t helpful, let me know, and I will follow up to roll back to your previous versions! 

I can’t speak for the future paths of the project, but right now, it’s probably less likely that the images on a brand new topic would be redone (unless you put in a specific request for them), because the team is focusing on bumping up instructiveness and helpfulness of images on existing articles. That might change in the future, but that’s a big focus right now. So for new topics, I’d say there are three good options, and it’s totally up to you which one you want to go with:

  1. You can forego doing your own images and put in a request for them, article by article.  It sounds like this isn’t what you want, so no stress at all - just offering it as an option.

  2. You can put up your own images and I can specifically ask for that topic to be excluded from the visual to-do list. Happy to do that so you don’t have to worry about it. Just let me know which titles so I can pass it on to them.

  3. You can put up your own images and we can still leave the article out there for possible technical illustrations or photos or videos in the future. With this path, there’s a possibility that they could use your pictures as a starting point and then use them as a guide to make something that goes beyond photos - for example, perhaps creating illustrations or photos or even videos based on them but adding some instructive annotations, arrows, etc to help readers through the steps. This is a pretty new experimental angle they’re taking, but so far the results have been pretty neat. For a nice example, check out  https://www.wikihow.com/Change-the-Wiper-Blades-on-Your-Car - videos with some helpful animation on top. They’re still taking baby steps with that idea, so it’s still slow going for now, but leaving your article open to later wikiVisual additions leaves it in the pool of titles for that kind of addition, down the line. 

So again - up to you! Let me know and I’m happy to follow through with any of those options:slight_smile:

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Hi,

Thanks Steve for bringing this to everyone’s notice.

I am also a little concerned with the pictures I added for drawing articles. Will those pictures be removed too?

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Hi!

I do my own pictures for a lot of articles (e.g. How to Validate Someone’s Feelings ) and have been doing this for just over a year. My concerns were similar to yours when I was starting out.

As far as I’m aware, WikiVisual maintains a list of articles that need illustrations. New articles go on this list by default, regardless of whether someone added images to them. Articles can be manually removed from this list.

It is possible to rollback WikiVisual edits, so the new pictures aren’t necessarily permanent. Of course, it is a waste of time for people to illustrate articles that already have good pictures, so an easy way to communicate that you added pictures would be ideal (so nobody else starts drawing pictures for them in the first place). That could be a conversation between you and people on the team if you feel you’ll be doing this often.