About WikiPortraits

The Problem

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects prioritize and require using freely-licensed images. As most published photos of notable people are press images with full copyright and non-permissive licenses, this results in a significant number of biographies with poor quality or no photos.

This hasn't gone unnoticed, having been covered by various publications including the New York Times in their 2009 article, "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos". While that article was written more than a decade ago, the problem persists.

The Solution

An effective way to gather freely-licensed photos of notable figures at-scale is to go to where they are!

WikiPortraits was created in order to accomplish this, by sending photographers to festivals, conferences, and other events, often as credentialed press. At these events, we also sometimes set up a photo booth where anyone with a Wikipedia page—speaker or not—may drop by and have their photo taken.

Among the events our photographers have captured: Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Cannes Film Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Nobel Prizes, CES, and the Pulitzer Prizes.

View our 2024 report for more of our coverage, and our category on Wikimedia Commons for all of our work.