Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Related pages/Flow

On English Wikipedia, when the related pages feature shows a link to Bernard Williams, the now deceased English philosopher, the image used to illustrate him is one of Shirley Williams, his ex-wife (who is still alive). This is confusing for readers and possibly also in contravention of the BLP policy on English Wikipedia.

I am not sure how the representative image is chosen. In the article about Williams, there is a fair use image of Bernard Williams in the infobox, and a CC image of Shirley Williams used later in the article. I'm sure there are going to be similar issues. How do ordinary editors go about fixing this?

I see what's happening. We have no free-licensed image of Bernard Williams on EnWikipedia or at commons. (I searched.) The article is using a non-free image under fair use. EnWiki policy is to minimize use of non-free images, in particular they can't be used outside the article for navigation purposes. The WMF has changed the Related Pages (at our request) to not use non-free images. It's apparently grabbing the next available image in the article. Unfortunately the "next available image" may be pretty random. It will often be rather inappropriate for representing the article.

There was talk about creating some way for editors to assign an alternate image, but in most cases we simply don't have one available at all. (We wouldn't be using the non-free image if we did have one.) It may be better for the software to just leave the image blank, rather than grabbing the second image.

Note that this is primarily an EnWiki issue. I don't think other languages typically use non-free images, or if they do they could have a different policy on their use.

The WMF is about to ask the communities for feedback on the Related Pages. Depending how it goes, it might render this issue moot.

Thanks for the response. To avoid the kind of embarrassment of using a picture of a person's ex, we'll definitely need a more precise method for specifying a representative image, or specifying that there is no such image.

We have https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683 open and I think this is the right solution to allow editors to fix the edge cases like this.

We did something similar for the Wikivoyage community when we launched page banners there.

It's worth noting this image will also be used by the discovery team's homepage and various other pages (not to mention consumers of our API) so even if Related pages is disabled this still remains an issue that I'd welcome help from editors to solve.