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Comment by uncletaco | Hacker News Reader

Recently somebody replaced the skyline and landmark photos of the Birmingham Alabama page with their shitty smartphone pictures from an overcast day and have cried victim because somebody called their pictures shitty. To me that's the lamest edit war because it happened in February and hasn't been resolved.

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Heh, that’s great:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Birmingham,_Alabama

(Dunno how to link to the actual comment in question from mobile but it’s near the bottom there)

> "I don't have control over the weather forecast, and i don't have the money for the best photography equipment in the world."

Reading this made my head hurt. "It's not my fault the pictures are bad, therefore these bad pictures should replace good pictures." I think I need to lay down.

I checked out his talk page and he has photos from all over the US, including my town! And the pictures he has for here aren't good either!

Reminds me of a user I found who was, what I consider, vandalizing pages by replacing black and white photos with his poor quality AI colored photos

Is it because the labour is unpaid, people think their contributions are equally as valid, or even proportional to the effort they put in? Like when someone volunteers for a charity/nonprofit but does a shit job and you have to ask them politely to stop.

I don't think that's really a huge factor, based on my many years doing all sorts of volunteer work. These kind of small conflicts happen all the time in all sorts of contexts. The thing that makes Wikipedia so difficult is there is no one with any authority to tell people to knock it off (or rather, things need to escalate quite badly before someone comes in and does so). At your job there's our boss or whomever, and even at many volunteer jobs there's often someone who intervenes at an early enough stage. This is also why small conflicts between neighbours can escalate so bewilderingly spectacularly in ways that can be hard to understand for onlookers.

TBF there's not many nice pictures that could be taken of Birmingham. Half that city is an apocalyptic hellscape.

That isn't true. I grew up there and most of the city is residential neighborhoods surrounding a downtown that has been getting renovated and updated for the past twenty years or so. In terms of particularly photogenic places there are:

* Vulcan

* The Kirklin Clinic (designed by IM Pei, his first design I believe)

* The County Courthouse

* 16th Street Baptist Church

* Various venues along Birmingham's freedom trail

* All of the pioneer churches have pretty unique architecture.

* Railroad Park

* Five Points South

Even Sloss Furnace is a pretty photogenic ruin. Also Woodlawn, where I grew up, has seen a lot of love. I remember when it smelled like piss on 1st avenue but now it just smells like outside. And tbh I've yet to see a biker gang with an assless chaps dress code so I'm not quite sure what you saw as apocalyptic.

I only briefly visited Alabama, but the Sloss blast furnace was a highlight of my trip. There is a haunting beauty to that place.

Sloss at sunset is a thing of beauty

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