Jump to content

Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Atari Landfill Excavation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 2 Jun 2014 at 05:09:01 (UTC)

Original – Workers excavating a New Mexico landfill to find boxes of unsold Atari Inc. video games, validating the existence of the Atari video game burial. With conflicting information on the burial leading to a minority believing it to be a urban legend, the event has become a cultural icon and a reminder of the North American video game crash of 1983.
Reason
High EV, unique subject matter involving the history of video games.
Articles in which this image appears
Atari video game burial
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Culture, entertainment, and lifestyle/Culture and lifestyle
Creator
taylorhatmaker; edited by Crisco 1492
  • Sigh. 1) It is a dump. It's expected to look like trash. Especially when you leave so many thousand pieces of paper and plastic to rot in the desert for 30 years (i.e. the games and their boxes). 2) Several packages are clearly visible, including in the left-hand man's left hand, near the left-hand man's foot, and near the right-hand man's feet. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:04, 24 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • To people interested in the Atari video game burial story, the photo may have "high EV" ; to general readers, it doesn't. In this user's opinion, FPs should be of intrinsic aesthetic, scientific or historical interest because they appear on the Main Page, where they compete for attention with countless other sites on the Net.
  • Others are free to disagree. Sca (talk) 15:06, 24 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Though I love video games and find this photo/event very interesting. I find a couple of men, scrambling through trash not amusing. ///EuroCarGT 21:03, 24 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I'm not exactly sure how to respond to some of these Opposes presented so far. I get why one would Oppose though. Seeing people going through trash is not something one would look at and say "That's amazing." But the fact is, this place was the dumping grounds in one of the darkest moments in video gaming. Because of how terrible Atari's business practices were, the company went bankrupt, along with others, and almost destroyed the video game industry. The fact that this burial ground exists is a reminder of the crash and its impact. commons:Category:Atari video game burial shows a couple of pictures during the event and just looking through them, a large amount would probably not pass because of either having nothing to do with the event or copyright reasons. While not aesthetically pleasing, it is more so historically important for the industry. It practically falls onto the lines of this as it is a one chance photo that cannot be recreated. GamerPro64 21:53, 24 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Regarding the caption, are the two men actually "excavating a ... landfill"? The garbage appears to be at or above surface level, and it looks more like they're sorting through trash than digging it up. While this image is never going to have any 'wow factor' (and it's hard to see how digging up a land fill site in a desert could be made visually interesting), it might benefit from a crop which removed the empty space at the left-hand side of the image. Nick-D (talk) 10:57, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is not the early stages of the excavation, by the looks of it, but rather after some of it's been uncovered (the left side looks like they dug, expecting something, but didn't find nothing). If it had been left like this for 30 years, there wouldn't be neat piles of trash. There'd be wind-blown, sun-faded, pieces of trash from Reno to Vegas. Re: Crop. I left that in to show the excavation site (interesting how they've only got a narrow strip going) and to balance the two workers on either side. I also didn't want to cut through the trucks. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:28, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose "Featured pictures are images that add significantly to articles, either by illustrating article content particularly well, or being eye-catching to the point where users will want to read its accompanying article". This does neither in my opinion. That it is, photographically, little more than a snapshot, doesn't help either. -- Colin°Talk 21:03, 27 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I think this is a great picture for us to have, but I do not feel that it is a good FP candidate for the reasons pointed out above. J Milburn (talk) 21:36, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Armbrust The Homunculus 05:38, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]