Criteria for featured pictures

On many of our projects we feature the best illustrations we have. Some of them are photos, some drawings, paintings, etches.. Some are created by our contributors, some are restored by our contributors and we judge them all by the same criteria. We do even when it does not make sense.

This is an enlarged copy of a portrait by William Blake. You can deduce its size because of the structure of the paper. The issues with its restoration where documented here. The original picture is according to the Library of Congress nine centimeters vertically.

This is a small picture but because of the quality scan it is still 2.29 MB in size. This is according to some too small. The size criteria however is reasonable when the focus is solely on digital photography. Digital photography is relatively young and for most of the historic subjects we cover we need the water colours, the pen drawings, the paintings, woodcuts and what not for illustration.

Some of these illustrations are small and like this picture of William Blake, they require a lot of work to be awesome. They make a big difference to the quality of our articles, they enrich our repository of illustrative material much more then another picture of sunset, a bug, a flower or another bunny.

There has to be point to our featured pictures. In my opinion it is to showcase the awesome material that we provide, high quality,freely licensed material for use by anyone who needs it. The current bias for modern digital photography makes us compete with so many other photo stock websites. A battle we lose. The restorations, the illustrations is where we are different. Together with the best modern and old photography we have in Commons a resource that excells.

Now to improve the STUPID biased criteria for featured pictures !!
Thanks,
GerardM