The WikiTree Computer suggests that I write the following or something like it:
I wanted to share this family photo of John Lewis with the community. Location: Prince George County Maryland. Date: 5 Mar 1710.
But here is what I really want to say!
The Computer -- and those who first programmed it -- imagine that people would use the "image" feature to upload a photograph of people -- certainly a reasonable expectation on a genealogy site.
Instead, however, it has been used extensively by people who believe "if it's in print it must be true" to upload scans of pages from books.
WikiTree is already sensitive about copyright, which also applies to photos of people, so it wants to know whether you took the picture yourself or whether you have permission from the photographer. But there is no place -- except in the comments -- to enter the actual source of a printed page. That makes it an afterthought and often nobody has thought to do it. So one can't tell where it came from.
Many photos of pages are problematic and shouldn't be attached to any profile. But in this case, it's a page from a decently sourced typed thousand-page publication which may contain other useful information.
In addition, the page is green privacy protected, but unlike a profile, contains no indication of its manager, so if the missing information about its provenance can be obtained, the data is not easily amended.
I would recommend that WikiTree put this matter on its priority list of technical issues to resolve. I imagine it would be considered too radical a request, but I wish the image loading feature could be temporarily disabled until this issue is fixed!
Click here for the image details page or here for the full-sized version (1656 x 2184).
