Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Kite experiment

Kite experiment edit

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 24 Feb 2014 at 03:25:44 (UTC)

Original – The kite experiment was a scientific experiment proposed and later conducted by Benjamin Franklin with assistance from his son William Franklin. The experiment's purpose was to uncover then unknown facts about the nature of lightning and electricity.

Reason: A Bald Eagle swooned over the canvas, giving birth to an electric celebration of red white and blue, as Uncle Sam stuck his middle finger up at Zeus above, and Ben Franklin (surrounded by angels, because why not) tamed the Greek god with but a string, a key, and a kite. Erm, what? This isn't a comedy website? I mean, this image is of high resolution, by a notable artist, and is solid testament to the quasi-legendary status of the topic and subject.
Articles in which this image appears: Kite experiment, +2
FP category for this image: Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Artwork/Paintings or Wikipedia:Featured pictures/History/USA History
Creator: Benjamin West

Support as nominator -- — Crisco 1492 (talk) 03:25, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Tepid support — Interesting, but Ben doesn't seem readily recognizable compared with more familiar images, such as that on the United States one hundred-dollar bill — Not that I see many of those! Sca (talk) 17:00, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Those aren't angels; they're putti. 24.52.103.154 (talk) 18:37, 16 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose There is significant damage here; this would need restoration for me to consider a support. Sᴠᴇɴ Mᴀɴɢᴜᴀʀᴅ Wha? 05:58, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Significant damage to the scan, or the painting? As this is not being nominated with an article on the painting, that oppose is (somewhat) justifiable, but if an article were written on the painting itself (entirely possible) I don't think such a rationale would be acceptable (digital restoration would be misrepresentative of the painting). — Crisco 1492 (talk)
  - When I first wrote this, I meant restoration as in digital restoration, but looking again, it would have to be a restoration to the work itself, with actual paint. While this is not at all unheard of, it doesn't seem likely to happen.

I personally don't see much of a difference between digitally removing cracks from a painting and digitally removing other types of damage, which we accept as routine here. Look, for example at this Featured picture and the image it came from. A crack was removed in that, and it also had a stain removed and a good deal of age discoloration reversed. Ultimately, if a restoration results in an image of what the work looked like when it was first created, I don't see that as a misrepresentation. It would not be what the work looks like today, but what the work looks like now is itself a misrepresentation, just a more traditionally accepted one. Such issues are, I suppose, something that we will have to work out as digital editing software becomes more and more powerful.

All that being said, looking at this again, I feel that the damage is so great that a digital restoration might be impossible. As such, I don't see any scenario (aside from the painting itself being restored and rescanned), in which I could support this work as an FP. Is this a high quality scan that is faithful to the painting as it exists today? Yes. Is it Wikipedia's best work? No, the damage precludes that. I suspect that this is a highly controversial opinion, but it is the opinion that I hold. Sᴠᴇɴ Mᴀɴɢᴜᴀʀᴅ Wha? 08:13, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The main difference, in my opinion, is that the photographs promoted are generally (not always, but generally) photographic representations of objects or persons, rather than photographs as photographs or as notable works of art (and even then very few are only known from one print, unlike paintings). The one you link to was promoted for its representation of an event in the history of submarines, whereas something like the Nautilus, whereas the admittedly yellowed File:Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, from C2RMF retouched.jpg was promoted as an accurate reproduction of a painting as a painting/work of art, one of which there is only one. The sitter is not the source of encyclopedic value; it is the entire canvas, and changing that canvas in any way would misrepresent the object. Anyways, that's neither here nor there for this nomination, and I recognize that we are unlikely to agree on this point. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:20, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - Per nominator :) This belongs in the Museum of Bad Art. There's little encyclopedic value that this image adds to Kite experiment, I don't think this can be featured unless in an article about the painting. - hahnch e n 16:37, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 03:32, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]