A New York Times reporter contacted me over the weekend, wanting a quote for a story on paying people to do illustrations for Wikipedia. He asked me whether I thought that this was a radical departure for Wikipedia, which had never paid authors before. I said “it isn’t radical because illustrators aren’t authors.” The illustrators with whom I’ve worked are not domain experts. They’ve taken a pencil sketch from me and cleaned it up so that it doesn’t look like it was drawn by a developmentally disabled third grader. To me, paying an illustrator is like paying a typesetter or someone else who assist in preparing a manuscript. Of course there are medical illustrators and others who have substantial knowledge of anatomy and who probably be regarded as authors, but I wasn’t think of that when I suggested the following idea to Jimmy Wales: (1) author sketches in pencil, scans, and uploads to a queue, (2) illustrator somewhere in the world downloads the pencil sketch, reworks competently, and uploads to an approval queue (email notification to the author), (3) author reviews to make sure that the professionally drawn illustration is consistent with the pencil sketch, (4) illustrator gets paid and drawing goes live on Wikipedia, with hyperlink credit to a page where all of the illustrator’s contributions are shown and that has contact information for that illustration (I figured that prominent credit would cut down on the compensation demanded by illustrators).
So… please fill the comment section with your opinions. Is this a radical departure? Is the illustrator the author or the domain expert who did the pencil sketch?
This won’t make for an interesting comment, but I agree with your position almost exactly. I think illustrators can be authors, and I’d probably give them authorship credit a bit quicker than you might, but in the context of your wikipedia suggestion (which I like) I think it’s clear that they are not. I think the test for authorship should be the power to make subtantive editorial statements, either textually or visually. I don’t think an illustrator cleaning up an existing drawing, or even following a recipe for a drawing, would have enough leeway to affect any meaningful editorial contribution.
I think that for technical drawings, for the most part, illustrators are more like assistants, assuming they’re just following the instructions of the expert(s) who authored the article when making the illustration.
How long have you been a Professor at MIT? How can you afford a $20K donation on your teaching salary? Perhaps more people will be inspired to give donations if they know they’ll be contacted for the Times for a quote!
1. No, this is not a radical departure. Wikipedia authors have always been “paid,” with status, reputation, sense of authority, positive feelings of contribution, etc. I also think the concept with illustrators would have worked in the same way, without any cash payment, but the laudable donation on your part will certainly help to kickstart the awareness of this program to illustrators. The NY Times article is proof of that.
2. They are both authors. The illustrator is the author of his illustration and the domain expert is the author of his sketch. In either stage, the author could be a very-low-value-added hack or an artistic genius. Each has the potential to create and bring something of unique added value to the final product.
Steve: Fortunately I read my own http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science and decided to teach at MIT as time permits rather than attempt to earn a living wage as a full-time employee there. How can I afford $20k? I’m what folks at Hanscom Field call “lower middle class” (I fly helicopters, four-seat piston airplanes, turboprops, and, eventually, very light jets; the rich guys are in Citation Xs and Gulfstreams).
Michael: In denying authorship to illustrators, I did not mean to devalue their contribution to the project, only to point out that they are not ultimately responsible for the content of the illustration (usually fairly inane in most tech cases).
An illustrator does a lot more than a typesetter in most cases, unless the job is just cleaning up rough edges in Adobe Illustrator.
There’s a famous case involving Russian author Eduard Uspenskiy and art director Leonid Shvartsman over the rights to the image of Cheburashka, a Soviet era cartoon character. Cheburashka, sometimes dubbed “the Soviet pokemon” was conceived by Uspenskiy but drawn by Shvartsman, who gave the character its final look. In this wikipedia article – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheburashka – you can see the the book illustration and the illustration done by Shvartsman for the cartoon. I don’t think that the book description paired with the illustration in it would make Cheburashka a popular enough character to make it popular with Japanese schoolgirls 42 years later. Antonov An-72 nicknamed “Cheburashka” looks cuter than the original book illustration.
Authorship would usually belong to whoever did the pencil sketch. There are caveats though depending on the extent of the illustrator’s contribution.
When you’re writing a book professionally for a publisher, they have people who copy edit, do illustrations, help with layout, and all sorts of ancillary services. None of them are remotely considered authors, because the common thread is that they are rearranging the ideas of the author in a way that they’ll have more impact.
The more grey area is with the potential for peer commentators who are also illustrators. If an illustrator were to say, “I can draw this idea for you, but I don’t think it will communicate what you want. What you might consider is shooting for an illustration of (slightly different concept X) instead…”. That’s qualitatively different, because the illustrator starts to show influence on the content of the presentation, not just the form in which it is presented. In this case, the illustration still isn’t authorship, but the consultation on the topic of the illustration might be.
No, it’s absolutely not a “radical departure” for Wikipedia to pay authors or illustrators. Not paying people is not one of Wikipedia’s core characteristics, it’s a by-product of them. People aren’t paid because there is a need and a desire for mass-scale collaboration. The collaboration is the story, not the lack of remuneration for it. Because the traditional lack of payment isn’t one of Wikipedia’s core ideas/characteristics, I don’t see how changing it could be considered a “radical departure” from anything. It’s a quite normal and uninteresting embrace of the principle that some people want to be paid for their work. Ho hum.
I think that Illustrators are a kind of author. Kind of like cobol programmers are a kind of developer. It is a lot easier to find Python or PHP developers willing to donate code than Cobol. So for cobol you pay.
Since you’re a Professor at MIT– and would likely have some credibility on your areas of expertise — and have written some books which you already put online, have you ever thought of putting those articles in Wikipedia? Or, for that matter, have you done much authoring / editing of Wikipedia yourself? Do you know if many of your fellow professors like to add to Wikipedia?
Steve: Remember that I’m a humble part-time lecturer, not a full professor (who earns enough prestige that, with only five additional dollars, he can afford a coffee at Starbucks!). I have my own site, which predates Wikipedia by nearly a decade, so it hasn’t occurred to me to publish anywhere else. I have added to a few Wikipedia pages on aviation, but otherwise haven’t done too much with it. The average academic is primarily interested in getting tenure or maintaining status among his colleagues. Wikipedia’s main goal is educating readers. So there would be no reason for an academic to publish in Wikipedia or clarify Wikipedia pages (just as there is no reason for an academic to talk to undergraduates and, as you see at the Ivy League schools, they don’t!).
In the realm of patents the USPTO only gives inventorship credit to the person or people who actually had the idea being patented. The crew of engineers who reduced the idea to practice, the technical writers, illustrators and the patent agent or attorney who did the rest don’t get their name on the patent at all. Is this bad? One might argue that many people come up with great ideas but only those with the finances to develop them into patentable ones can benefit from such a system. On the other hand this system separates the true inventors from those who are doing work for hire under the direction of the inventor.
How about a photographer who is hired, but told speficically what to do down to the details of each shot? Is that creative work? Copyright law generally favors the photographer. How about an engineer who is only told to get a project done but comes up with an original idea only marginally related? These ideas all belong to the employer by the terms of employment. In the absence of specific laws the market generally favors those in power regardless of the level of creativeness involved.
Here’s a day-in-the-real-life recap that validates your illustration concept for wikipedia, via a method I have used with great success. And I think this recap addresses the hierarchies of authorship.
As background, in a past life I was often the creative director and/or editor and/or graphic designer on various publications for which I had budgeting responsibility, so add the publisher hat. Publications were one facet of my job as Public Information Coordinator for the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities in Sun Valley, Idaho. The bottom line of that job was > fill every class on campus with the dynamic demographic mix we want to pull in from around the country. I did that from the first season, for five years.
Because of photo.net I will add that the quarterly, tabloid-size newsletter I initiated gave visiting artists Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann and more a photogravure-quality venue they loved at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Although the newsletter targeted grant and funding decision makers at a national level, our approach roundly embraced the local resort and rural community audience – and thus everyone interleaving in between. My signature style was and still is to facilitate original voices rather than staff-write or editorialize, another affinity with wikipedia.
Now to the illustration concept and method. Usually I knew what kind of illustration look and impact I wanted for a particular purpose. Although I draw well, I didn’t have time to practice or equip myself to produce that specific look and instead went to the artist who was already doing it best. I paid the artists their usual rate but minimized costs by making the interaction fun, efficient and rewarding for them. I provided a sketch for look and layout; detailed specs for size and line weight of the finished artwork so it would fit publication specs, very important for final outcome!; any visual references for specific details, or “scrap;” the content context so as to elicit the most informed artistic response; and I always published credits that made them happy.
So I think you can see the hierarchy of authorship and ownership, starting with the Sun Valley Center, or wikipedia in your suggestion. The illustrator artists were not authors or visiting artists. The operative language is that they did “work for hire,” whether based on an hourly rate or a lump sum bid. They got payment plus full credits and ownership of their own drawings or artwork. Wikipedia would probably want to retain the right to republish. Artists have told me that some of the works I commissioned and specced by this fairly exacting method are still favorite creative pieces in their portfolios.
For wikipedia, acting on your suggestion would provide them with a valuable enticement to the work of writing for wikipedia. How delightful if authors could select a best illustrator from a diverse, global group of illustrators, and if wikipedia had developed a handy system of specs for size and line weight for publishing line art online. I have been needing and thus thinking about that kind of specs recently and if anyone has developed them for distribution I am not aware of it. I’d be happy to talk with wikipedia about it. I can introduce the perfect tech and art person to work with them: he who used to take my manila envelope of scrap every week and turn out a world-class Rapidograph drawing while he watched the evening news after skiing all day. His drawings were sized-to-fit at 100% in the N.Y.Times or the L.A.Times, they inspired editors to ask for more, and with the fun- efficient-and-rewarding method they cost me $40.
It would sure be nice to create an ongoing marketplace for original expository art and to enliven the visuals online. There may be some realistic art brokerage potentials for wikipedia in your concept as well.
Philip, I think your creative suggestion is wonderfully generative and truly in the spirit of wikipedia! Bravo!
The description of Wikipedia’s illustration selection process in the N.Y. Times raises some questions, posed here with some possible answers.
“The woman running the project for Wikipedia, Brianna Laugher, says the plan is to create a list of articles that need illustrations and then solicit the work. The first list is expected to have 50 illustrations and be completed this month. Contributors will be able to sign up for an illustration and have two weeks to submit it; if it is accepted, the illustrator will be paid $40.”
The repeat of $40 payment in my post is a coincidence. The terms of submission in this last sentence are a turn-off. Will talented people with busy lives submit the high quality drawings Philip envisioned to one global free-for-all RFP after another? Who knows how many thousand drawings Wikipedia might receive? And for Wikipedia, this selection process would quickly become much too cumbersome to be carried forward economically.
Instead, Wikipedia should consider posting a gallery where pre-qualified illustrators can show samples of their best work, perhaps in response to an RFP, and where Wikipedia’s authors and editors can go to select the look they want for their articles. “Pre-qualified” could also include references for project performance, when those are available. I would guess that this is much closer to the process used by Britannica for obtaining quality illustrations.
“Ms. Laugher said, however, that there has been little concern at discussion sites. “I think there is a difference between paying people to get the whole going versus paying people to do the parts that volunteers apparently don’t find rewarding,” she wrote. “The illustration project is definitely the latter.”
The main impediment to volunteer illustration at present may be lack of specs. If Wikipedia developed clear illustration specs for their consistent ongoing project, they could probably attract volunteer illustration. The artist/mentor who did those great drawings for me advised, “Never design anything until you understand the production process.” For publishing online, “the production process” means specs for size and line-weight that allow drawings on paper to translate into the allotted illustration size in pixels and retain the same art effect – without becoming too wispy or too heavy in a different medium.
Again, I would be interested to talk specs with Wikipedia, and my artist/mentor could do them a world of good. Under the right circumstances, Wikipedia could provide an attractive global venue where you could send people to view your volunteer work. But then, why pinch the starving artists of the world who could benefit from the generative ongoing marketplace for illustration expertise that Philip envisioned?
Phil, you say: “The average academic is primarily interested in getting tenure or maintaining status among his colleagues. Wikipedia’s main goal is educating readers. So there would be no reason for an academic to publish in Wikipedia or clarify Wikipedia pages.”
I agree that’s true now, but that’s not to say that academics can’t help Wikipedia at all. For many years some graduate classes at UC Berkeley, MIT etc, at least in engineering and science, have been scribed by students for some portion of their grade. Since the advent of the web, many of these courses now post the scribed notes on their course websites.
At Berkeley some professors have changed the model slightly: instead of insisting that students take turn in scribing the notes and produce a PDF for the course website, they have instead asked students to scribe the notes and create/modify a Wikipedia page on the topic. The course website then links to the appropriate Wikipedia pages.
I’m sure other professors at other schools have also gotten students to update Wikipedia like this; it would be terrific if more instructors switched to this model. If simply every class at every university that had a “scribe” component to the grade insisted that the students put their notes on Wikipedia (and were graded on the Wikipedia version), then a lot of high-quality content would be added to Wikipedia on many rather obscure topics (these are graduate courses…) that would probably otherwise not have been written about.