User blog:Stephan222/Why we should use original images

So, another part to my series on plagiarism is up. Here I'm addressing another problem: stealing images. Unless the images are fanmade, it's not so much of a problem as stealing work, because the images are part of a copyrighted show.* In fact, pictures from this wiki show up all the time on sites like Twitter and Tumblr when people talk about Ultraman.

It isn't too hard to get screencaps. If you use VLC, shift+s will take a cap. There's browser addons if you watch streamed stuff: my browser, [maxthon.com Maxthon] allows you to take a snapshot with ctrl+f1, and, unlike VLC, lets you select an area. The one disadvantage is that the colors on Crunchyroll tend to be plainly washed out.

The main reason we shouldn't use other people's images is seo. Original images play better with bots, which allows people using image search to get an image from this wiki. We currently have nearly 24,000 images, an impressive number, but many are stolen.

Please note, we should still use official pics, particularly for series, gaidens, or dvds. Also, pictures from sites like [blog.m-78.jp the official ultraman blog] are ok. We just shouldn't use screencaps taken by other people. Again, this isn't so serious as the previous posts. However, on the page Kodaigon the Other, I had to replace a lot of low-resolution pictures which were found in the thumbnails of Google Image Search by someone who right-click saved them. That won't do. No image should have dimensions under 200px or quality under 400px. And then, some people don't like having their screencaps used elsewhere.*

It's not hard to get screencaps. The more images we have, the better, and all the better if they're original images. I recently uploaded a good amount of original, high quality images to the Niruwanie page, and it was a lot easier than cleaning up the grammar on some of this wiki's pages. We should have more original images just because it's respectable, cool and good for sourcing and research.

Stephan222 (talk) 04:45, December 9, 2014 (UTC)

* It could be argued that as the image was not created by the owner, we can use it. It is technically copyrighted by Tsuburaya, but using it on a wiki qualifies as fair use. It's a matter of human perception more than legality or morals.

** As a wiki, part of our philosophy is allowing our images to be shared, providing there is proper credit.