There are limits to free speech -- no yelling fire in a crowded theater and all that. I am just asking, is a huge, beautiful rendering really necessary and responsible? Maybe if the FBI had asked that question instead of threatening they would have gotten a different answer.
Part of the concept of free speech is that it doesn't need to be responsible, necessary, understandable, or anything. Unless it is used in the commission of a crime, it is free.
This poster has a point, why do you downvote instead of answering or disagreeing?
I'm rooting for the underdog (especially when it's a public service like Wikipedia vs the big bad US Government agency), but he's asking for Wikipedia's criteria for selecting the image size for display.
Apparently there are valid reasons, which the FBI will not like:
"(...) of sufficiently high resolution to allow quality print reproduction. Still images should be a minimum of 1000 pixels in width or height; larger sizes are generally preferred. The size of animated images is judged less strictly, though larger is still preferred."
The seal has been uploaded to Wikipedia as an SVG. SVG is a vector image format, which allows for arbitrary resizing without any loss in quality, while the PNG (raster) version is automatically generated on Wikipedia's servers at whatever size the user wants.
Once upon a time, this site had something of a tradition of saving the "piling on downvotes" for people who were outright rude/aggressive/trolling rather than saying something that was simply wrong.
The “featured picture criteria” are not the same as the criteria for any image anywhere on the site. It is doubtful that the FBI seal would ever be a featured picture.
Thanks, I did not know that (nor the fact that it was SVG).
Still, it's one of the criteria for uploading images that Wikipedia uses (if it ever decided to feature the seal, it would use this criterion for doing so).
"Logos uploaded to Wikipedia must be low resolution and no larger than necessary."
and
"U.S. law prohibits the reproduction of designated logos of U.S. government agencies without permission. Use restrictions of such logos must be followed and permission obtained before use, if required. However, this does not affect the copyright status, because as works of the federal government, they are automatically in the public domain. These should be tagged with {{insignia}}."
But would it be so awful for Wikimedia not to post a 2000px X 2000px high quality rendering of the FBI seal?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/US-...
There are limits to free speech -- no yelling fire in a crowded theater and all that. I am just asking, is a huge, beautiful rendering really necessary and responsible? Maybe if the FBI had asked that question instead of threatening they would have gotten a different answer.