Collaborating my ass.
Not to give these guys a pass, at all — this is some seriously skeezy marketing — but I think this underscores a deeper issue of paid accounts on Wikipedia, which is totally a thing as I found out recently. Apparently there people, or maybe a whole ecosystem, who are essentially lobbyists who get paid to edit Wikipedia pages, and that's okay, as long as they mark that they're a paid account, or something.
I guess if you follow Wikipedia's rules for paid accounts, it's okay to update pages in favor of your brand?
Corporations are also frequently under attack on Wikipedia, so that they want to do some kind of reputation management is quite understandable. Better they do that openly and have to be clear in their intentions, than that it's hidden.
I was curious why this article we're discussing doesn't show the after pictures, since it's about defacing. (The picture at the top is the one that was replaced - so we only see the before pic.)
From the video, it seems because the after pictures are beautiful and way better, which I'd guess is why the real volunteer Wikipedia editors kept them rather than reverting them and why it was so successful. They do show a tiny logo incidentally as part of travel gear that is in the photo but other than this it seems the photos are way better. It's not like the logo takes up more than a few pixels.
Any counterexamples? (A photo that was worse than the one it replaced)? If not I think I can't agree with the word "deface". Maybe if the brand placement were more conspicuous or damaging to the photo -- but the ones I saw honestly seemed fine to me and seemed like an improvement.
"we improved wikipedia with fantastic royalty-free images of popular destinations, taken with travelers who were also wearing our gear" seems like an alternative way to phrase what happened. then we wouldn't be talking about it.
I'm happy to be proven wrong if someone can show a before/after example that wasn't an improvement. Any examples?
The photos were uploaded as CC BY-SA, which I think is probably a silver lining, even though the deletion nominations often talk about blurring or removing the trademarked logo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_North_Face_W...
Does Wikipedia have a policy on logos in photos in general?
There is a ton of stuff companies could do that include their brand in an incidental way. Here is the article on kidney stones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_stone_disease
imagine a medical supply company took an objectively much better photo but had its logo in tiny letters somewhere on the tape measure or a beaker or something. seems to me a fair trade, it's pretty hard to take stunning photos and there are lots of subjects that don't have it. as long as it's just a few pixels and passes a normal human filter (it's better than what it replaced) I am just not seeing the huge harm. if the after picture was worse, it should get shown in this outrage article.
If Wikipedia were to let that pass, we could "look forward" to product placement attempts in every damn photo on the site.
Few pixels it may be, but it's a line that's important not to cross. Ever.
If a medical supply company replaced medical article photos with much better versions but which showed their logos in a few pixels on some equipment, would this be unacceptable for you?
For me the production value would probably be worth it.
I think the key difference is that the hypothetical medical supply company produces the products that the article you're talking about is written about. I'm fine with seeing Coca-Cola logos on the Wikipedia article about Coca-Cola.
The North Face, however, does not own the national parks and scenic locales from the articles they defaced. They were not adding professionally shot photos to articles about North Face products.
not on a page that's related to them or their equipment. What do you think about such a scenario, if the logo is small?
I don't have a problem with the logo itself. I have a problem with the motivations behind a corporation having the power to manipulate the information seen on such a global resource like Wikipedia that has almost nothing to do with their company.
The risk is ruining the whole thing by introducing commercial bias everywhere. The already imperfect mods now have a new, and probably impossible, spam filtering job. It's already imperfect and shows considerable bias on some pages, so you want to explicitly permit more?
Where does it stop? Who defines "better"? If you allow ABC Medical to discretely brand the image, do you allow XYZ Medical to replace those with photos with their brand? If not, that's hardly fair, so why not? What if it's ever so slightly less discrete? Are we expected to keep trusting the advice on the pages when an illness page is covered with Pfizer images - who entirely coincidentally just happen to have a drug for that illness? Do they get to bombard Wikipedia with "better" advertising laden photos ad nauseum until there's a can of Brawndo in every article, or every editor gives up and quits?
There's far too much advertising, branding, empty PR, and corporate shilling in the world already without proposing more vandalism and allowing idiots to shit adverts and brands all over one of the few spots that remains relatively clean.
Everywhere is not a sales opportunity.
so it's a question of whether the result is objectively better.
the shilling concerns you raise about article text are more than real. they're a battleground of socket puppet manipulation.
in theory that's why things have to be sourced, original research isn't allowed, neutrality has to be kept, etc. but in practice it's a really bad.
so I'm much more concerned about article text than I am about images and you raise a really valid concern.
Of the "landscapes", take the image of the woman in black in dead centre of shot - it's terribly framed unless you just wanted a photo of your wife's ass. For deciding if I'd like to visit the region the only thought is "get out of the damn way". The orange tent in corner of landscape? Crop that shit out and have a decent landscape shot. Better still, get a photographer bright enough to take 3 steps left first.
The production value is solely of product placement not landscape photography, suited only for their website. Now then, if North Face had paid a renowned landscape photographer to take some excellent photos for Wikipedia it could become well known with no logo or product in sight. Positive PR, and probably a note on North Face's page for genuine production values. Except that's no longer an advertising campaign.
What did North Face achieve? Made sure I buy Patagonia, or Jack Wolfskin etc next time I'm buying outdoor gear - which I do fairly regularly.