On Wikipedia, Anyone Can Be a Model
In June 2020, back when we were all marching the streets in masks and it felt like the world was ending, an anonymous Wikipedia editor started an article called “Thirst trap.” With six sections and 32 sources, it treated the thirst trap with all the seriousness and thoroughness with which Wikipedia approaches the Battle of Dunkirk, stolen moon rocks, and the list of stuffed dishes. Thirst trap’s creator, an anonymous Wikipedian with the username LittleT889, even included a “methodology” section.
LittleT889, Wikipedia’s thirst trapper in chief, reveals almost no personal information about himself, and his Wikipedia contributions are so wide-ranging that it’s hard to deduce what he’s like. Since he registered a Wikipedia account in 2006, he has created 140 articles: many about Korean parks and unusual desserts (ice-cream potato and bologna cake). But he’s also dipped his toe into music (Bach’s), animals (the giant mottled eel), medicine (Dyserythropoiesis), and slang (ratchet). The range!
He’s anonymous, but I’ve seen his corporeal form with my own two eyes. Perhaps you have, too. He included a photo of himself in the thirst-trap article—a fittingly thirsty move that I cannot help but respect. The shot is a run-of-the-mill Tinderesque snap: abs flex in the foreground; toilet paper hangs in the background; a black-and-white filter gives the shot an aura of noir mystique. But it’s got a bigger audience than the average thirst trap—it’s been viewed almost a million times.
He does more than just thirst trap. He adds photos of himself to all sorts of encyclopedically relevant topics, like water bottle flipping, Nae Nae, and my favorite, the Floss (dance) article, where he wears sunglasses indoors and furiously shakes his hips in front of three guitars and a bongo drum. During that halcyon summer of 2010 when millennials wore neon outfits to sweaty nightclubs and sang “teach me how to Dougie, teach me, teach me how to Dougie,” LittleT889 answered the call with a Dougie article—complete with a looping demonstration.
His image is all over the web—he’s the internet’s freely licensed prototype of the Running Man dance—but he’s utterly anonymous: his face obscured, his name hidden. He told me on a talk page that besides a few close friends (one of whom helped him film the Naruto Run), no one in his life knows about his Wikipedia edits. He’s one of Wikipedia’s famous models you’ve never heard of.
On Wikipedia, anyone can be a model. You don’t have to be a nepo baby with Elastigirl legs and freakish cheekbones. You don’t need to endure exigent auditions or get scouted in a Midwestern mall. The pictures in encyclopedias are purposefully ordinary, like stock photos, but crucially different in that they’re freely licensed and homemade by pretty much anyone who is willing—no application process, few standards, and no style points. And even though Wikimedia Commons hosts more than 100 million pieces of media, it has some stunning gaps. There’s a big list of requested images, and some of the items are shockingly quotidian, like “half-up hairstyle,” “businesswomen shaking hands,” and “tripping” (go ahead, fall on your face for the sake of free knowledge).
Since almost anyone is allowed to join the august craft of gesture photography, the site’s photos have an unvarnished feel and an unmistakably human charm. They’re set in beige basements and in cluttered dorm rooms, taken with the trusty family point-and-shoot or a handy smartphone. They’re quirky and human and sometimes drenched in way too much indoor flash.
It’s immediately obvious that Wikipedia’s models are real people, not actors. The couple from the “High Five” article ended up getting married to each other, and last year they re-created the photos with their kids. The guy in the “Shrug” article, who was inexplicably wearing a tiara, has hordes of shruggy fans. If you zoom in on the background of the photo for “Zolgokh,” a traditional Mongolian greeting, you can make out an overflowing hamper and a massive container of cheese balls (it was taken in a dorm room, I learned). And the duo who grinded the night away on a Pittsburgh-area bar crawl were the king and queen of the Wikipedia article “Grinding” for many years (they also made it onto a BuzzFeed list called “36 White People Who Need To Be Stopped”).
Wikipedia has no shortage of drunken Nikon Coolpix snaps from the Bush years. The photo of “Wheelbarrow Race” is full of motion-blur and raindrops, and the two guys in focus are outfitted in cheeky headwear (a captain’s hat and a cap that says CIA: Christians in Action). Their mouths are open so wide you can spot a uvula.
“We had one of the best weekends you could have in 2007 in NYC,” the wheelbarrow racers told me in an email. The duo, college pals Moss Levenson and Ryan Kroll, had planned to finish a perfect May weekend with a kickball game, but when rain flooded the field, they started playing around like kids. Moss’s wife snapped the wheelbarrow flick on a cheap digicam, and since they couldn’t stop going on about how their weekend had been the definition of fun, Moss put it in the Wikipedia article for “Recreation.” Another editor moved the blurry shot to the article “Wheelbarrow Race,” where it lives on in all its frenzied, bokeh-heavy glory. It’s not a good photo by artistic standards, or even encyclopedic standards (it’s blurry and bizarre) but I can’t shake the wabi-sabi affection I have for it.
Wikipedia gets a lot of flak for its abysmal photos, especially its mid-sneeze celebrities. But I’ve always found the unvarnished images both endearing and inviting. Wikipedia’s volunteers, usually sequestered in the mothy recesses of talk pages and admin noticeboards, remain invisible to most readers. Their occasional appearances in prosaic photos are the most visual hint that Wikipedia was not handed down from the heavens or generated by an all-knowing machine, but handmade with care by real, fleshy humans. The photos are like a whisper to Wikipedia’s hundreds of millions of daily viewers: “Wikipedia editors—they’re just like us!”
A Farsi-speaking Wikipedia editor has added four photos of the inside of their mouth. An unidentified man has uploaded hundreds of photos of his own eyelashes, along with fawning captions (“long, lush,” “coveted as a sign of beauty,” and an “attractive facial feature in many cultures”) that suggest at least a twinge of vanity. A 20-year-old Russian university student named Rasim Ringazov told me that he once he took a picture of his eye so astonishingly beautiful that an Instagram post wasn’t enough—he needed to put it on Wikipedia, where it remains today, winning staring contests with all who visit the “Eye” article. When a retired biology teacher in Germany realized that Wikipedia had no good photos of female fingers, she uploaded a snap of her own hand to Wikimedia Commons, and her well-trimmed digits greet the Wikipedia readers who decide, for some reason, to read up on fingers. “I have photographed a lot of my private stuff and uploaded it when I saw a need,” she told me in an email, which also included a link to the public domain plaster cast of her teeth. Like Renaissance artists who sneak self-portraits into their paintings, editors leave behind traces of their own likenesses.
Photos are not just dingy amateur snaps, of course. Wikimedia Commons editors import media from museums and governments and old, public domain books. Skilled photographers upload sublime shots of everything from mollusks to molecular origami, and a small portion of them receive the coveted “featured picture” distinction, awarded by a ragtag jury of volunteer encyclopedists. Because of Wikipedia’s massive reach, a few of the site’s most diligent and talented photo contributors have spun their hobbies into bona fide careers. In 2015, the National Journal magazine pronounced college student Gage Skidmore “the most prolific photographer you’ve never heard of.”
Annual drives for images about Africa, monuments, and living heritage attempt to fill the site’s stunning image gaps (it has long struggled to diversify its overwhelmingly white, male, Western base of contributors). And plenty of less prominent photo contests exist, too, including a tongue-in-cheek “Unreasonably Difficult Photo Contest” that calls for pics of the probably extinct Pezoporus occidentalis, the undiscovered tomb of Genghis Khan, and other near-impossible subjects.
I’m not here to proselytize, but if you have a hankering to join in on the photo fun, tools like Wikishootme show you nearby landmarks that need photos. You can submit to Wikimedia Commons’ monthly photo challenge, which is currently themed “Beach.” (Last month was “Millet.”) Before you go willy-nilly, I’ll warn you to not replace good images for the sake of self-promotion, and definitely don’t upload your dick pics (there are—I cannot stress this enough—enough!). But if you’re willing to follow the rules and enrich public domain photography, you can start with some easy and low-stakes gifs for thumb-twiddling and cannonballing. Perhaps you can enrich the article “Tortilla Art,” or, if you dare, the photo-less article “Eating Mucus.”
Wikipedia is the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever had, and Wikimedia Commons gives it color with 100 million free-to-use media files, everything from caterpillars to thirst traps to a full-length 1915 porno. But it’s not complete, and it’ll never be complete, and maybe it needs you.
Thirst-trap archivist LittleT889 says the shirtless mirror selfie and dance videos are motivated by the noble goal of furthering free knowledge. “I feel like I am making a (very) small contribution to humanity when I edit Wikipedia,” he told me on a talk page.
“Long after I’m gone, I might still be dancing the Nae Nae in that gif.”
