Seems odd to me. It's certainly true for the few percent of most popular subjects but not for the long tail. Load the wikipedia page for the town you live in

Seems odd to me. It's certainly true for the few percent of most popular subjects but not for the long tail. Load the wikipedia page for the town you live in or a less populous neighboring town. Follow the links to the articles on some of the things in your town-- parks, etc. For most people you'll immediately find articles without images. Searching the internet usually won't get you images or at least not any freely licensable ones. And when you do find images they're often random snapshots and not images taken with a particular eye for their educational/informative/representative qualities. If there are many photos then sure, suitable ones can be found. But when there are few pictures then getting one that captures the right presentation is just luck unless you go and take one. A problem I've seen on Wikipedia is that I'd go through a lot of work to create an illustration for an article, then someone will replace it with another image which is then removed on its own merits (like a non-freely licensed one, or some vanity picture of themself)... and no one goes back and rescues the prior image from the history. I wouldn't mind if my contribution had been replaced by something even better, but it's a bit sad to see it lost to wikirot. There are whole domains of archivist photography that could be included on Wikipedia (or on sister pages for subjects on commons) that are largely untapped-- images captured from the same location at different times of day or times of year, HDR panoramas for capturing incident lighting at a location, intentional catalogs of plant and animal life, 3d models, etc. The only domain that you can say is already well covered is random tourist snapshots of locations tourists are prone to visit.