Last week I and many other students received notice that The Lawns, that leafy undergraduate hamlet in the large village of Cottingham, would cease to offer accommodation in the next academic year. At some point I ought probably to make a post discussing this issue in more detail, but for now what piques my interest is the article which appeared in The Tab three days ago. The third photograph is of the balcony on the upper floor of the Lawns Centre, which I took in October 2017, about a month after moving into Ferens Hall, and subsequently uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This got me wondering where else my images may have turned up.

Snooping around, I found this blog post by Beyond Nuclear International, which laments the recent death of Paul Flynn MP. Nearly two years ago I attempted to make a Wikipedia article listing all current members of the House of Commons in order of seniority. I eventually abandoned the project when I discovered that such a page existed already. Unlike the article just referenced, mine would have included the free-licence portraits of those members which had recently been published. The late Mr Flynn was not included in the new gallery, nor did there appear to be any other photographs of him that were available under the terms necessary for Wikipedia. After searching fruitlessly for a few days, I decided to fill the empty table cell with a cartoon image which I constructed using the shape tools on Libre Office. The fabricated portrait was never used on any real articles, so I rather expected it to languish in permanent obscurity. The use of my crude caricature on BNI’s sombre blog post is especially perplexing given that the page already features two photographs of the departed, the first a publicity shot courtesy of the CND and the second a screencap of parliamentary footage dubiously credited to Flickr-ite Ninian Reid.

Curiously there are to be found at least two photographs for which I am credited even though I did not take them: an editorial in The Oxford Student and a newsletter by the Shropshire Patients Group. In both cases the images were screenshots from short educational films which were released on the UK Parliament YouTube Channel in late 2012. In these cases it seems most likely that the creators of these articles found me listed on the file pages as the user who uploaded the images, and mistook that to mean that I had been the one who took those photographs in the first place. One dreads to consider what this says about the reading comprehension skills of the people of the people who produce these websites, and can only hope that the rest of their content is more carefully considered!

UPDATE (June 2020)

Fifteen months on I have produced a sequel.

UPDATE (May 2023)

It seems that the article in The Tab has been deleted, as the link now just goes to their homepage. I did, however, find this one from the BBC using another of my photographs for the same story.