Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/NPOV images

A picture tells a thousand words.

This is a well-known proverb, but in the context of Wikipedia, it likely is not very accurate, and perhaps less so in the context of military history articles.

Wikipedia aims to be scholarly, preferring references and opinions from academics and their works rather than the relative tattle and sensationalism of newspapers, or less reliable sources, such as gossipy or "entertaining" magazines.

Nevertheless, while pictures are not necessary for a higher status when not available due to Wikipedia's desire for free content, they are generally highly useful if they can be created by the user, particularly graphs, maps and illustrations that can help the reader visualise things. They can be extremely useful in summarising and visualising information in a way that cumbersome literary descriptions cannot.

While there are many benefits of appropriately utilised images, there are also many pitfalls to be avoided in utilising images on Wikipedia.

POV pushing in graphs

This is a perennial theme in politically or ideologically charged documentaries, advertising and election campaigns. In addition to deliberate misinterpretation or misrepresentation of statistics, gimmicks in the form of misleading graphs and other visual diagrams are often used.

Politicians invariably wheel out graphs depicting various indicators of the well being of society, and aside from cherry-picking and bending the numbers out of shape, they also engage in warping the appearance of the graph to trick the casual viewer into perceiving that their successes are greater than is the case, or conversely, that their opponents’ failures have been of a colossal magnitude.

The most common method is to not start the graph at zero on the y-axis, but at the lowest point of the graph. As a result, if unemployment has declined during a certain timeframe, it will appear to the casual viewer that unemployment has dropped from the heavens to 0.0% due to the economic policies of the government, when it has in fact dropped from 7.5% to 7.2%, only that the y-range was taken to be [7.2, 7.5]. On the contrary, if inflation has risen from 4.1% to 4.5%, the opposition will tend to campaign with a graph in the range [4.1, 4.5], depicting a catastrophic inflationary spiral.

Some go so far as being cartoon-like, with no values on the axis at all, and only show random curves skyrocketing and plummeting depending on political need.

Needless to say, both methods flagrantly violate NPOV and are to be avoided on Wikipedia.

POV of images

While photographs cannot be POV in isolation, they can be used in articles as a means of pushing POV, usually through undue weight, or in series with other images to push POV. This is to be avoided.

In the context of military articles, one of the most obvious ways in which this can occur is through the excessive or unbalanced use of potentially inflammatory images. Typically this occurs through the use of images depicting bloodletting or destruction of infrastructure. This can occur particularly in articles about a conflict. NPOV requires that one should give proportionate amounts of prose to the respective facets, and so one should do accordingly with the images. Unless only one side engaged in massacres, death and destruction, which is highly unlikely, it is severely inappropriate and a major violation of NPOV to have a numerically overwhelming selection of images of destruction wrought by one side.

In any case, emotive images of the sort can tend to be emotive and highly inflammatory, and can be unencyclopedic. While Wikipedia is not censored, some types of images generate so much contention over POV issues that it may be best to steer clear.

POV in artistic depictions

Other types of images can be POV in isolation without requiring context in an article or group. This typically occurs in artistic depictions, where an opponent may be drawn with an evil-looking face, while the statue of a national hero can elevate them to mythical proportions, eg, the statues of Truong Dinh, Tran Hung Dao and Emperor Le Loi in Vietnam depict them as comic book superheroes with disproportionately large, toned and triangular torsos that were not possible in their period, and often with imperious and authoritative facial expressions.

Except to depict the propaganda or historiography in question, artistic images or statues used to depict historical figures from the pre-photography era should be chosen to avoid POV overtones. Likewise propaganda billboards erected by governments to assail other countries and their leaders should only be used to depict propaganda or the government attitude itself, not the other country or leader in question.