[jimbob45]

Excellent post!

To be sure, I don’t even live in Mark’s state and it’s on him if he wants another picture on his profile. You’re a stellar citizen, though, for taking action on your own!

I simply wanted to point out a trend on Wikipedia. Mark is just one of more than a dozen candidates with bad pictures or, worse, empty pictures that seem to be the result of sabotage. If you look on these candidates’ pages (or Mark’s page), you can look at the revision history and determine that there were past pictures taken down or replaced near election times.

Again, I don’t care. It’s up to these candidates to fix this stuff if they want to win. With the amount of money they’re bringing in, you’d think they could hire someone to spin them up nice profiles with ‘Political Stances’ sections and quirky stories about their family life. I wonder if they intentionally keep their profiles empty to funnel traffic to their personal websites instead.

[barnbuilder]

Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo.

You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If anything it is an example of bias towards incumbents, who get professional taxpayer-funded public domain portraits that are easy to drop into Wikipedia pages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ac...

[jimbob45]

?? I see him as having had a different picture as of this [0] edit (several years ago). The filename (MarkRonchettiNM.png) is a different filename than the current one, leading me to believe that the file was simply taken off the Wikipedia servers and redlinked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ol...

[barnbuilder]

Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned.

Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting a Creative Commons license on the screenshot that the Youtube page makes no indication of.

The uploader is also now suspended on all Wikimedia projects for abusively using multiple accounts, and their main account[1] has on their talk page lots of records of deleted political-oriented images with many instances of inaccurate licensing and poor quality.

(If someone has a Wikipedia account it would be nice to flag the image on Ronchetti's page for deletion!)

All this to say, Wikipedia's editing process can by its nature be pretty messy and often produce some suboptimal results, until such time as someone comes along and fixes it. This should not be confused with a concerted effort by the people running the project itself.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melvingatez34

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Over9000edits

[barnbuilder]

Just wanted to retract that about the license -- I missed on the Youtube page that it does have a Creative Commons license listed there.

[dpifke]

File history says it was deleted due to the uploader not having rights to it:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MarkRonchettiNM.png

Most likely it was taken down due to a notice from the copyright holder:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Volunteer_Respons...