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It is disappointing that the researchers examining "quality" images on Commons chose to use Commons:Quality images as their benchmark of community consensus over what makes a high quality image. A simple query to the Commons community would have informed that that this was a useless measure of the quality of images as they appear as thumbnails in Wikipedia articles. The reasons are:
- The Quality Image badge is only available for images generated by a user on Wikimedia Commons. The majority of images on Commons, and no doubt the majority used on Wikipedia, are not user generated. They may come from government sources, be old historical images, or otherwise scraped from another site like Flickr. Many images are also merely reproductions of an artwork.
- The Quality Image criteria is not at all concerned with how great an image is from an artistic point of view. It need not have any "wow" at all. An straightforward view of some suburban railway station, with an overcast sky and a messy collection of commuters will get QI if accurately focused and exposed.
- The technical requirements of QI are concerned with pixel-peeping the full-resolution image, not analysing the little thumbnail on Wikipedia. Many images that are somewhat out of focus or very noisy look fine in thumb.
- There is a minimum resolution requirement for QI which is way above that necessary to produce a nice thumbnail.
- Even for those images that are user-generated, it isn't like all of them have been judged, as only those who participate at QI tend to nominate their own images.
- QI only requires the approval of a single judge (though there is scope to contest a vote). It is hard to say that a promotion represents community consensus vs the opinion of one random individual.

As a consequence, QI is more a forum to encourage Commons photographers to take and upload technically fine images taken with high quality equipment. It is in no way an attempt to categorise the body of images as being of high quality. -- Colin°^Talk 07:43, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Colin: Interesting points. Part of the justification of this approach in the paper includes the claim that "Only a few images make it to the “image quality” category: there is, therefore, a large consensus on the quality of the images in that category", which does seem to be a bit in tension with the process as you describe it. That said, your first bullet point might pose a bigger threat to the construct validity of the resulting image quality measure as used in the paper; at least I don't see an easy way to rule out the possibility that the underlying classifier overfits on, say, the image being a photo from a contemporary digital camera and other aspects that may be over-represented among images created by Commons users themselves.

CCing two of the paper's authors (those whose wiki accounts I was able to find via the research project page on Meta-wiki) in case they want to comment: @Miriam (WMF) and Daniram3:

Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:28, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User:HaeB, I'm having difficulty processing your reply, working out which sentences you agree with me and which you don't or that you only partly agree. Could you rephrase it in more straightforward language and shorter sentences?

I clicked on Random Article a bunch of times and recorded the first 10 photographs that lead each article that had one. They are:

File:191125 Taylor Swift at the 2019 American Music Awards (cropped).png Author: Cosmopolitan magazine. Taken from Youtube.
File:Mikhail Darski.jpg Historical photo take from another website.
File:PanoramicaStadioPinto.jpg User generated photo.
File:Gerard van Velde portrait.JPG User generated photo.
File:PeterJohannNepomukGeigerEroticWatercolor04.jpg (NSFW) Scan/photo of a historical artwork, taken from another website.
File:Pictionary Party.jpg User generated photo.
File:Alliance Films logo.JPG Corporate image. Non-free image not eligible to be hosted on Commons.
File:Naturalis Biodiversity Center - RMNH.MAM.17371.b ven - lasiurus Ega Ega - skin.jpeg Donated photo from a museum.
File:Throwing rocks (3843366278).jpg Photo scraped from Flickr.
File:Murgoo2.png Historical photo take from another website.

Of the three user generated images, one is only 0.7MP so not valid for QI. Another is 2.08MP so barely valid. All three would not pass QI, even though all three serve a useful illustrative purpose as thumbnails in their articles. Mostly, being a useful illustration of the subject, and good-enough at thumb, is all that Wikipedia needs. The other seven images would not be valid at QI no matter how great they were. -- Colin°^Talk 18:41, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]