Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20170222025243/@comment-188432-20170525085708


 * First off, a little plea from your friendly, neighborhood admin: T:FORUM says that your post can be deleted or moved if it's off topic. So please stay on topic. It's massively difficult to close these discussions when people deliberately take a left turn every twenty or so posts. I'm going to do my best here, but I'll probably miss something.

The policy quoted in the original post, T:IUP, is effectively original to the wiki's earliest attempts at writing a manual of style. I have personally never been comfortable with its language, because I think it's inherently conflicted. Since the 2010 thread, Forum:Character infobox image standards?, I have always thought it imposed two standards:
 * television - where we very firmly can't use promotional images for in-universe articles
 * non-visual media - where we allow, for some reason, the obviously promotional images of book and audio covers

To my mind this is an entire betrayal of our bedrock principle that all media are to be treated equally. Prose and audio just don't have pics, folks. That's the nature of those beasts. And as I said back in 2010, I don't want someone telling me that Lucie Miller necessarily looks like Sheridan Smith. And I really don't want to be told that Erimem looks like Caroline Morris. C'mon now -- that's just not even plausible.

Moreover, as this this thread now asserts, some of these illustrations are actually at odds with the narratives that they are meant to illustrate. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't have time to figure out which ones are narratively true, and which ones aren't.

Sure, in the past, I've uploaded the odd DWM illustration. In particular, I'm the guilty party on the Erimem/Five image seen above. But that's because I was damned tired of seeing the very white Caroline Morris being fobbed off on covers as an Egyptian princess. It's ridiculous.

But at the end of the day, the easiest administrative solution here is to ban DWM illustrations of stories they didn't originate. Which is to say that T:IUP basically stands as is. There was no mention of DWM-illustrating-BF-and-books in T:IUP before this debate started, and there's still no mention of it. So it's not allowed. Removal of these images from in-universe sections will occur in due course. However, the images may be used in behind the scenes sections.

I realise this will disappoint people who really like images. I know some think that images must be present in every article. But that's just not true. We deal in non-visual storytelling on this wiki, and there are thousands of pages that will never, ever get any kind of illustration. It's totally fine.

For clarity:


 * DWM illustrations of audio characters? Henceforth disallowed, save in BTS sections.
 * DWM illustrations of novel characters? Generally no. As SOTO has pointed out with the alleged Anji picture, it's not Anji, but merely a suggestion of a real life person who might be a model for Anji. That's not nearly good enough.  Concept art belongs only in BTS sections, and even then, this isn't concept art.  It's just "fun with Photoshop". However, in the mid-90s, DWM did Virgin novel "preludes" which were illustrated. Those illustrations are valid.
 * Video trailers for audio stories? Again, no. Trailers are never, ever valid in-universe sources. We start allowing this, and there's no logical defense against those cinema trailers using video specially shot for the trailers. Trailers are simply not a part of the narrative.
 * Doctor Who Legacy images -- I don't even know why that's in this thread, but what the heck? No. Absolutely not. Please proceed to the DWL wiki if you wanna use those.