User:Donald Trung/Letters to Scott Semans/Requesting permission

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Scott Semans in 2014, the man behind so many images of Chinese and Vietnamese coins and other numismatic objects on Wikimedia Commons.

Scott Semans is a leading expert in African and Asian currencies, he has notably worked with many authors of many definitive works in those fields and gives handy advice to authors of numismatic works. He owns an online coin shop and also sells exonumismatic objects such as talismanic coins and token coins. Other than the coins themselves he also sells many books 📚 about numismatics. I have contacted Mr. Scott Semans in the hope 🤞🏻 that he would like to donate images of coins to Wikimedia Commons.

Listing every Chinese cash coin on Wikipedia (30 D. 07 M. 2018 A.)

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"Dear Mr. Semans,

I am a volunteer contributor to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, I mostly write articles about Chinese numismatics and am planning on writing a full list of every Chinese cash coin by inscription, only unfortunately there aren’t images of many different variants so I would like to request permission to use images from your website, specifically the images listed on the following pages:

https://coincoin.com/seXC1.htm

&

https://coincoin.com/seCC9.htm

I am also requesting permission on the latter as I also wish to cover all coinage from the Qing Dynasty including non-cash coins.

Yours faithfully,
Trung Quoc Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE: Listing every Chinese cash coin on Wikipedia (31 D. 07 M. 2018 A.)

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"Dear Scott,

Thank you so much for your reply, however simply giving me permission to use them on Wikipedia isn’t enough, this permission has to be mailed to a group of trusted volunteers who will then process your permission (usually this takes 120 days) and then I can upload them to Wikimedia Commons. Also you can only give permission for scans and photographs you made as legally you don’t own the copyright of other people's works. You can contact this team of volunteers by e-mailing (or simply forwarding) to “Permissions-Commons@Wikimedia.org”.

Also Wikimedia requires you to give permission for others to also use your texts and images commercially, however you will fully retain all of the copyright to your texts and images (until 70 years after your death), but others are required to attribute you and your shop by name if you so desire (this is something which I would advise you to do, this means that every time someone uses an image you created or a text you wrote they should attribute you (and/or your shop) or they are liable to legal action (getting sued) by you, this is also the type of license I've recommended for John Ferguson of Sportstune.com and all of the images from his website are now on Wikimedia Commons with many being used in Wikipedia articles such as “Qing Dynasty coinage”.

If you have any more questions I would love to hear from you.

Yours faithfully,
Trung Quoc Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. RE. Listing every Chinese cash coin on Wikipedia (31 D. 07 M. 2018 A.)

"Yes, I am actually aware of Zeno.ru, but the copyright there is a lot of more to tackle, you could process the ticket but as you already have that statement on your website you could just send me the page where it is used and then you don't have to send permission to the Wikimedia OTRS team at all.

And as you already use a creative commons license there is no need to change anything, I usually advise content creators to use more restrictive licenses however as you only want attribution the current license you seem to be using seems fine to me. All I care about is knowledge and making that more freely available using a medium as much people as possible have access to. I am actually still very early in the concept stage of this list as I had just created a full list of iconography of Chinese charms, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinese_numismatic_charm&oldid=852783778

And tonight I will launch an article about “Yongle Tongbao” cash coins on Wikipedia as I think that the article about Ming dynasty cash coins is far below what I would consider to be “readable”, anyhow I know that your website had a whole listing of Chinese charms, do you still have those images?

And by the way I would still advise you to forward these e-mails and write to the OTRS team about the permission just to have this in the archive in case any future claim of copyright infringement from my part will be made (Wikimedia Commons has a lot of copyright paranoia).

Yours faithfully,
Trung Quoc Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

Importing your images (01 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

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"Dear Scott Semans,

I found the page with the license, and will make a custom template that will show the copyright © statement, further it will organise all of your images into a single maintenance category.

As for your offline images, it's best to send permission to the aforementioned e-mail address but I probably won't have to wait half a year to start uploading. As for the list, as I’ll be busy finishing it I will probably not have as much time with importing until I’ve finished it, but I will try to do both.

By the way, do you still have any images of Chinese charms?

Yours faithfully,
Trung Quoc Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

Replying to your 4 e-mails (01 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

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"Dear Scott,

I will reply to your 4 e-mails separately and chronologically (as I received them).

E-mail #1:

Replying to the first e-mail, I don’t believe in any restrictions in the flow of information either, governments exist to serve the people, not to censor them. Any institution that believes in destroying information because they believe that their rules are more important than knowledge or basically any information have outlived their usefulness and need to be reformed to serve the people.

However the reality is that we don't live in a world where those that make the rules that affect our daily lives care about us (the people) but simply to those that help them win elections by paying them, anyhow that’s a very deep discussion that I have a lot of opinions on but on Wikimedia Commons the rule is that even if the copyright © owner doesn’t care about others using it, without permission it's not acceptable. But your website fully falls within an acceptable license so unless the copyright © paranoid will attack there will be no issues with importing.

E-mail #2:

Regarding the comment “The first illustration, many charms on a wood stump, are all "garbage" modern reproductions, not necessarily made in China, not at all impressive to someone who does know the field.” Well, it’s in my native home country Vietnam so yeah they're not necessarily a good illustration, but as the article is about all types of charms including modern ones it's not completely out of place, but then again I’m rowing with the belts that I have (Dutch proverb, literally translated), and as for the second comment “Also the "sex" charms, you might do more research, as these are all considered modern, and possibly not even Chinese in origin nor ever used in China.” And subsequent comments, I actually mostly used Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek as a source, most other sources confirm the symbolism but as I was discussing the content of the article with David Hartill (who is working on what will be the definitive Western work on cast Chinese amulets, and after seeing a preview of his upcoming amazing work am convinced of this fact), he noted a lot more errors although he didn't say anything about the “sex” coins. I read somewhere on a forum that someone believed that these were mostly made during World War II and the Korean War for Chinese soldiers, while I’ve read contradictory statements by people in that same thread that claimed that they may have originated during the 19th century in the Qing Dynasty with others claiming the Ming. None of the participants named any sources so I took all with a grain of salt. If there is something you will notice about that entire article that if you take away Chinese cash coins, Bamboo tallies, and coin tokens that article is “a mirror of the entire Primaltrek website by Gary Ashkenazy”, most other sources are confirming the symbolism or the existence of the types of charms but David Hartill called Gary Ashkenazy completely bogus and said that these descriptions are “themes” and not “types” due to the huge overlap between these types.

The internet is like “a collective human brain 🧠” and as I’m someone that doesn't collect Chinese charms nor had any interest in them I am basically 100% dependent on Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek and as I imported basically 100% of that website I won't be able to go beyond (as much as I would want to), and yes I am familiar with the works on Chinese charms, I know Fang, I know Thierry but at the moment all of my free money (my “hobby budget”) will go to my family or to buying coins, mostly silver commemorative Euro coins so I am not really planning on buying any books (YET) to improve the articles on Chinese numismatic charms, in fact David Hartill said that I shouldn't list Horse coins (gambling tokens) as they’re not really “charms” and in cases where Gary Ashkenazy was really odd in “classifying something as a Chinese charm” (bamboo tallies and Jiangsu tokens) I simply split them into separate articles. Thankfully Bert Lijnema helped me with the “Bamboo tally” article.

I downloaded the .zip file and... Couldn't open it, this is because I only have a phablet (my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the one I’m writing on) and for some dumb reason can’t unzip zips.

For the record I did ask Gary Ashkenazy if he could donate his images to Wikimedia Commons as he has a very big “ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (2016)” sticker on his website, and when he finally replied after a year he seemed very hostile to the idea, so now I have all of his information but none of the images to illustrate it. This is also why I contacted John Ferguson (Sportstune.com) and the Dutch Museum of Cultural History. Having the images from Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek would essentially solve all charm- and token-related shortages but due to “personal reasons” he seems very much against the idea of cooperating.

E-mail #3:

In response to “Better than Sportstune, I think, is the Kokotailo site, but I'm not sure how easy he is to contact these days: http://www.calgarycoin.com/reference/china/china.htm#index”, yeah, I actually did contact Kokotailo, he didn't reply. As for Sportstune.com, I am very grateful to John Ferguson for his donations, not necessarily for the content but because of his import in the field of Chinese charms I could both “finish” “the Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek thematic type of categorisation” and create a large beginning for using “Edgar J. Mandel’s descriptive categorisation”, the result could bE seen here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Chinese_numismatic_charms

Now I have created a basis for others to upload more images in the future, when I started it had 0 subcategories and only 14 images of which 11 were modern charms found in supermarkets and tourist shops, John Ferguson’s Sportstune proved to be very valuable.

E-mail #4:

“I think there is a specialized book on Yongle cash, from Japan - can check this out if you don't know it.” The Eiraku Tsuuhou (Yongle Tongbao) is actually a very popular subject among Japanese numismatic rings but rather obscure or seem as “a minor coin” by Chinese ones. I kind of rushed the article and basically it's 75% Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek, 15% Oda Nobunaga, 5% Ryuukyuu, and 5% “Other”, you can see it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Tongbao

I am not sure if I created it out of spite towards Gary Ashkenazy and saw that his Zheng He article was the #1 search result on Ecosia, or because I was looking for an excuse to not finish the full list of Chinese cash coins (I often find myself procrastinating). Anyhow the article is out there so I hope that others too will expand it in the future.

I will improve it in the future myself probably but again, I’m mostly limited to online sources and the books that I have, my “mission” to bring all of that information in one place which is mostly done now, creating new content from offline sources is “phase 2” and that list would probably be the only European language content online listing all of those cash coins, but it will still mostly be “a copy of Hartill’s work” and he already donated half of his book to Wikipedia years ago... But again, the information is there but the images are missing.

Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. Replying to your 4 e-mails (02 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"I can borrow my wife's computer and unzip them there, did you say that all of these images were made by you?

I wanted to put all information on Chinese numismatics from every website into Wikipedia and last week I (finally) succeeded doing that, but most information is offline. One of the main reasons why I imported EVERYTHING to Wikipedia is because if you look at this list:

http://www.charm.ru/links.htm

9 out of 10 websites will give you a “404” notification.

“As you say, get something started, and fix it from there - you won't motivate someone to fix the errors unless errors are there!” Yeah, but there is a Wikipedia article entitled “Ming dynasty coinage” that is just rife with misinformation and rubbish sources. I haven't tackled it because I think it’s too much work and hope to supersede it with the full list of Chinese cash coins by inscription.

I will notify you when I’m done with the Cash coin list article, but honestly I’ve never seen as much images of struck imperial Chinese coins as on your website, so I am already looking forward to import all of them.

Also I had created a list of Vietnamese cash coins by inscription earlier which you can see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_cash#List_of_Vietnamese_cash_coins

I will import your images of Vietnamese cash coins first to improve this list with more illustrations as Toda illustrations are notoriously inaccurate, however they are in the public domain.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. Replying to your 4 e-mails (03 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"Great, I will try to unzip it on my phablet. Can you please send your standard Creative Commons license and this .zip file explaining which images are yours to “Permissions-Commons@Wikimedia.org”?

As the content is (no longer?) on your website I can’t point to it for being freely licensed.

Don.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE: [Ticket#2018080410000275] Replying to your 4 e-mails (07 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

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"Scott,

You don’t have to do anything further regarding this .zip, I uploaded all the files and a volunteer will check if all the files match the ones from the .zip, several new categories had to be created for Knife charms, Jade charms, Etc. I think that Wikimedia Commons is now #2 to Zeno.ru for images of Chinese numismatic charms, although Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek isn't far behind. I also received permission from Bob Reis (Anything Anywhere) but that ticket isn't processed yet.

I think that with your website I will probably start with Vietnamese cash coins first before I will do Chinese coins.

Don.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. RE. [Ticket#2018080410000275] Replying to your 4 e-mails (07 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"You’re right, the first .zip wasn't complete. Could you forward this .zip too? Try to forward it with this title (which includes the current ticket number), if you’ll get a new Ticket then please give me that number too. I got 90 distinct files and 101 files in total the previous time, this one includes all of these plus a dozen extra.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. RE. [Ticket#2018080410000275] Replying to your 4 e-mails (08 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"By the way, I have an idea, why not place all .zip files on one webpage? That way I can download and extract them all and we wouldn’t have to use the OTR system to confirm every image. I’m busy now with Vietnamese cash coins, but if you have more images I'd love to upload them. I’m combining way too much projects at the moment, other than writing that list of Chinese cash coins by inscription I’m writing an article about Open-work charms (I have several reasons for that, my best-friend really likes their design, I don’t want to create 25 redirects to a small section that “doesn't tell enough about them”, you told me that you wrote extensively about them, I want to write at least one more article about Chinese numismatic charms to help inspire people in the future to spin more articles off, honestly I don’t really have much with charms/amulets as I don’t collect them but I want to write as much about them as possibly and writing about Open-work charms would be the limit I could write about with what we have on the internet now), after finishing writing about Open-work charms I want to start writing about individual cash coins by inscription (I already did this a lot for Vietnamese cash coins). I already did the ones of which information is easy to acquire (Kaiyuan Tongbao and Yongle Tongbao) but I want to start writing about the Hongwu Tongbao and all its variants soon.

When I started working on cash coin articles last year the only article that contained more than the most superficial information was “Ancient Chinese coinage” which was donated by David Hartill basically containing half his book (though minus the images), now I can confidently say that Wikimedia is the best (European language, at least) website about cash coins (all types), now just to create a full list of inscriptions and find images. In fact until recently Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek was the only (European language) website that even had information about Rosette holes, I imported all of that… except for the images, I actually saw that you listed a lot of cash coins with rosette holes on your website but only have a handful of images, do you have more?

After the Hongwu Tongbao I actually don’t have any articles planned (well, maybe one about the Gia Long Thông Bảo). Do you by any chance have images of bamboo tallies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_tally

No illustrations.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. RE. RE. [Ticket#2018080410000275] Replying to your 4 e-mails (08 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"Thank you very much, in retrospect that webpage would've made the OTRS ticket useless. I’ve already organised all of the shared URL’s and will continue importing soon. Thank you very much for the extra information about open-work charms.

I’ve just imported all images of Chinese charms, there were many specimens I’ve never seen before... But then again I'm not a collector and mostly only read about them through Primaltrek... Yeah, that’s basically it, and the preview David Hartill sent me of his upcoming definitive work on Cast Chinese Amulets (so until 1900). By the way I’ve already spoken a lot with Bert Lijnema, he sent permission to let me use all of his images of bamboo tallies from Zeno.ru and sent me an article he translated from François Thierry de Crussol I could use for Wikipedia to expand that Bamboo tally article (before that it was really small...), the problem is that today the OTRS takes 125 days to process a ticket while last year this was only 30!!! I’m still waiting for Bob Reis’ ticket from many months ago.

Today I had an idea to also write about lock charms but information about those is even more scarce but that’s why I think it should be on Wikipedia, for most people (including myself for many years) all they do is read Wikipedia and then rarely search outside, for me it was the reality that there was almost nothing on cash coins that I had to “look outside”, I hope to be able to provide “a complete as possible” picture through both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons so collectors (or just people interested) don't have to go too far to find anything. Also Bert Lijnema seemed very upset over the fact that every day new Chinese forgers of bamboo tallies seem to pop up left and right while only keeps getting harder to purchase real ones, cash coins are unfortunately suffering from the same, and I wouldn't even dare to buy a pre-1949 struck Chinese coin from a seller, I remember getting scammed 10 times in 1 day while I was in New York City with fake struck Republican coins.

I think that’s why the internet loves you so much, because in an ever growing sea ⛵ of fakes you still sell the real deal.

This website:

http://www.chancientcoins.com/index.asp

Is where basically all the fakes on eBay come from.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

Help with identification requested (10 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

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"Dear Scott,

The list of Chinese cash coins on Wikipedia has reached a roadblock, I need help with this image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/S553_Ming_Dali_HuoPing_1_%288112001575%29.jpg


I can’t find the Chinese characters on this cash coins, my modus operandi is I first use David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coins, then I search the internet using the inscription of a coin and verify Hartill with a Taiwanese website… but this coin isn’t in Hartill, for example on your website you have a Guizhou local issue Taiguan Tongbao (Circulating treasure of big Mandarins, or “Circulating treasure of fat Mandarins” if it were Japanese :-P) that isn’t in Hartill either, but on a Taiwanese gossip and half-naked pictures of women website (which apparently report on cash coins) I found a post about a rare Shui Guan Tong Bao mother coin being found and there they listed all the Guizhou local issues… this coin wasn't there, instead the Britannian (from Little Britain/Britanny) Jean-Michel Moullec argued that this coin came from Dali, Yunnan during the Ming Dynasty. I can’t seem to find anything about the numismatic tradition of the Bai people but as it’s normal for non-Chinese peoples to sladopt the Chinese culture I would find it realistic, especially since the poor calligraphy reminds me of Javanese cash coins, and the Javanese people never adopted Chinese script (unlike the Bai).

By the way, I found several sources that claimed that certain types of open-work charms were from “Dali during the Song Dynasty” however Dali was first a part of the Kingdom of Nanchao and then of the Kingdom of Dali, did the Bai people cast these hyperintricate pieces with highly detailed temples? Were it ethnic Han immigrants to Dali? Again, I don’t know how far the Bai people adopted Chinese culture to give a good assessment of these claims, I know that the Kingdom of Dali was just a collection of uncivilised ruffians like the Liao Dynasty but even they had a strong numismatic tradition in the Southern circuit.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

RE. Help with identification requested (10 D. 08 M. 2018 A.)

"Thank you in advance, I’m at a bit of a standstill right now with the list, David Hartill donated the first half of his book to Wikipedia and that became a very big article. I will have to check every entry he wrote with his own book and the list uses a very different organisational structure than the article David donated. I recently wrote the last in my series of individual articles about types of Chinese numismatic charms, if you have the time feel free to see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_charm

After this I will stop with (standalone) Chinese numismatic charms on Wikipedia as I’ve imported ALL information from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek and the few other websites that cover them (most information is offline). As for the cash coin list, when you’re no longer out (as this has (A) no priority at the moment and (B) no hurry) could you link the page where you store all images of Chinese cash coins on your website? I imported all Chinese charms/amulets/talismans and all Rosette 🏵 hole cash coins from your website, I’m busy with machine-struck Chinese coins now before I will go to either Chinese cash coins or Vietnamese cash coins.

I’ve been stalling importing all images of banknotes from the world in the public domain for too long so I will probably only import all ancient Chinese coins from your website once I’ve done that, but will import all struck coins first as those were severely underrepresented on Wikimedia Commons for too long.

By the way, do you have any other Guizhou local issues? Your website also states that the Qing Dynasty and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom cash coins would appear at a later date, are the images already in a list or didn't you have the time to upload it yet?

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

Information about Chinese cash coins
(taken from Scott Semans World Coins)

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+* BASIC REFERENCES ON CHINESE CASH (004c).

    • [ Source page 📃 for this list 📃].

Consulted method of communication

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J* Order@CoinCoin.com

Original publication 📤

[edit]

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 17:33, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Maintenance category ⛑🏻

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  • License, will have to integrate it into the category somehow.
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