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Comment by dpifke | Hacker News Reader

Photos need to be Creative Commons licensed; Wikipedia can't just use ones from a random Google search.

The image for Mark Ronchetti was uploaded by a user who shot a video of him in 2020. Since they created the video, they own the copyright to the image and can license it to Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Ronchetti.jpg

Searching for other CC-licensed images doesn't return anything:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mark+ronchetti&iax=images&i...

https://www.google.com/search?q=mark%20ronchetti&tbm=isch&tb...

I've emailed his campaign to ask if they have a photo they can license appropriately and upload to Commons. If you have a better photo of him (that you took yourself and are willing to license for free use), you can upload it here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard

View on HN

For anyone following along (unlikely), press@markronchetti.com replied with a photo and asked me to upload it for them (sigh). I did so here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Ronchetti_Heads...

...and requested they complete the license authorizing its use:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Email_templates

I'm giving it about 50/50 odds they'll fill out the form and the photo will stay up, but at least I tried.

I agree with the other posters who point out that this is a bit of an unfair advantage for incumbents (who have government-sponsored public domain photos available for use). It'd be an awesome thing for volunteers to try to help with, by reaching out to less tech-saavy campaigns as I've done here.

I've been to New Mexico maybe 4-5 times in my life and have basically zero stake in this race, but I guess duty calls[0]. ;)

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

Excellent post!

To be sure, I don’t even live in Mark’s state and it’s on him if he wants another picture on his profile. You’re a stellar citizen, though, for taking action on your own!

I simply wanted to point out a trend on Wikipedia. Mark is just one of more than a dozen candidates with bad pictures or, worse, empty pictures that seem to be the result of sabotage. If you look on these candidates’ pages (or Mark’s page), you can look at the revision history and determine that there were past pictures taken down or replaced near election times.

Again, I don’t care. It’s up to these candidates to fix this stuff if they want to win. With the amount of money they’re bringing in, you’d think they could hire someone to spin them up nice profiles with ‘Political Stances’ sections and quirky stories about their family life. I wonder if they intentionally keep their profiles empty to funnel traffic to their personal websites instead.

Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo.

You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If anything it is an example of bias towards incumbents, who get professional taxpayer-funded public domain portraits that are easy to drop into Wikipedia pages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ac...

?? I see him as having had a different picture as of this [0] edit (several years ago). The filename (MarkRonchettiNM.png) is a different filename than the current one, leading me to believe that the file was simply taken off the Wikipedia servers and redlinked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ol...

File history says it was deleted due to the uploader not having rights to it:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MarkRonchettiNM.png

Most likely it was taken down due to a notice from the copyright holder:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Volunteer_Respons...

Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned.

Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting a Creative Commons license on the screenshot that the Youtube page makes no indication of.

The uploader is also now suspended on all Wikimedia projects for abusively using multiple accounts, and their main account[1] has on their talk page lots of records of deleted political-oriented images with many instances of inaccurate licensing and poor quality.

(If someone has a Wikipedia account it would be nice to flag the image on Ronchetti's page for deletion!)

All this to say, Wikipedia's editing process can by its nature be pretty messy and often produce some suboptimal results, until such time as someone comes along and fixes it. This should not be confused with a concerted effort by the people running the project itself.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melvingatez34

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Over9000edits

Just wanted to retract that about the license -- I missed on the Youtube page that it does have a Creative Commons license listed there.

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