Keeping that Internet alive!

Oh Wikipedia, please bestow upon me your sweet baby tears of knowledge about uh, visual novels:

A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル) is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays.

I'm all for the interactive, the fiction, the anime-style art even, but tableau vivant? I clicked on that link, and um, no. Just no.

But enough of the font of pointless knowledge. The seedy underbelly of Wikipedia that are talk pages are a much better read, sometimes, especially when they're longer than the actual article. Does the visual novel talk page follow this example? Oh hell yes!

While I recognise that free images are vastly preferable to copyrighted images, I don't think it's really reasonable to illustrate an article about a game genre with a fake "screenshot". Particularly not if the caption claims it's a real screenshot of a "typical" game, which the Wikipe-tan image definitely would not be.

You see, the image currently displayed on the page to illustrate what the hell they're talking about is this:



"Hey, look at me, I'm on Wikipedia! And I am Wikipedia! Wikipedia is awesome!"

So you could see why this user might have a problem. Seems perfectly reasonable. But it's Wikipedia! So instead of "sure, let's find a real image to illustrate the article" we get:

I'm not opposed to the use of fair use images, and I think they usually add great value to our articles. I'm usually on the side defending the use of a fair use image. However, in this article, this specific article, that kanon image does nothing more than the Wikipe image. If fails policy. This is not optional. Had that image actually added some value to this article that Wikipe-tan's could not (an image of a girl in front of a backdrop with a dialog box) then you might have a point, but that's all the image is. This is not the same as those other articles you listed.

Ah, policy. Because Wikipedia policy is the Constitution and you're Justice Scalia.

After that settles down, we get a discussion about what the "fake" image should look like. Everyone seems to hate it, but with the last comment made two months ago, the image still hasn't been changed.

Wikipedia: You always get what you want, if you have a longer attention span.