Some may wonder: Could there be a bad picture of Halle Berry or George Clooney?

Just visit Wikipedia. There you’ll find a fuzzy shot of Ms. Berry from the mid-1980s, when she was part of a U.S.O. tour with other Miss USA contestants. She is out of focus and wearing a red-and-white baseball cap  in short, she is barely recognizable. Mr. Clooney, in his Wikipedia entry, is shown in Chad wearing a khaki vest and a United Nations cap. Smiling, he is ruggedly handsome in the company of two women who work for the United Nations; still this is hardly a glamour shot.

Then there are big names like Howard Stern or Julius Erving who have no photograph at all on Wikipedia.

At a time when celebrities typically employ a team of professionals to control their images, Wikipedia is a place where chaos rules. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto this site. This is because the site runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited.

“Representatives or publicists will contact us” horrified at the photographs on the site, said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia encyclopedias in more than 200 languages. “They will say: ‘I have this image. I want you to use this image.’ But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.”