User talk:Neelsmith

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Neelsmith!

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Category by artifact

Hi,

It appears you recently created a lot of cats by artifact, using the museum accession number as the name.

In fact, I'm a little sceptical. When I look to Category:Louvre Cp10475, I see that:

1. The one-line description in English should be wikified.
2. The accession number is "Cp 10475" and not "Cp10475" (there is a space).
3. This cat is not categorized, so nobody can find it.
4. This cat contains only one photo. Is it useful to create a lot of cats for each item in the Louvre with only one photo in each?—I don't think so.

Anyway, it would be useful to discuss of the changes first, to see what to do and how. Bibi Saint-Pol (sprechen) 12:15, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Rationale for category by artifact

Bibi Saint-Pol -- thanks for your comments. Your work (both beautiful photographs and beautiful documentation) is a big reason I'm involved in Wikimedia Commons.

I'm interested in organizing categories for artifacts for several reasons.

Most obviously, having a category for an artifact seems like the appropriate way to group a large number of media files illustrating the same object.

But even if the number of of files is small -- even if there is, at present, only a single file illustrating an object -- creating a meaningful category name can be useful for software that uses the wmc api to extract information automatically. Referring to an individual artifact by the official museum name and its inventory is probably the most natural naming convention for this purpose. I've been experimenting with programs that can take a list of standard references in this form (e.g., "Staatliche Antikensammlungen 2309"), and automatically embed material from wmc into, e.g., course material for archaeology students.

I hastily put together a handful of categories to experiment with, and you're right to point out their shortcomings: of course they do need to be linked to sensible parent categories, and I'll correct that shortcoming now that I have a set of categories to test programs against.

Some questions I would appreciate advice on:

1. Would categories for artifacts would be a natural home for those parts of an artifact's documentation that focus on the artifact, rather than on the image? This would avoid repeating the same information for every image illustrating a single object, and would make it possible to update or modify a single source to apply those updates to all category members.
2. What criteria should guide the placement of an individual artifact in a parent category? Where individual museum or museum gallery pages already exist, that seems like a reasonable choice, but there may be artifacts from collections that aren't represented (or not yet represented) by wmc categories. What's the best way to proceed in a case like this?

Again, thanks for your comments,

Neelsmith (talk) 21:33, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

OK. I see what is your point.

I've got a lot of thoughts coming to me. But before to make a full response, I shall ask you first what is the "wmc api" you are talking of? Do you have a link or a doc? Bibi Saint-Pol (sprechen) 08:50, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I should have been clearer: it's really a generic mediawiki api (not specific only to commons). I've personally been using the implementation in the Java Wiki Bot Framework (here on sourceforge)

Also, in case I was unclear -- for me, part of the appeal of the API is that a bot can query by category name. Once you have a valid category name, you're into wikimedia, and can walk the category tree, find information about specific media files, etc.

Neelsmith (talk) 13:21, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi,

I'm missing time. I'll try to give you a full answer tomorrow.

Best, Bibi Saint-Pol (sprechen) 10:00, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Finally...

Things are happening in the same time: see [1] which deal with a great part of you concerns... Bibi Saint-Pol (sprechen) 10:29, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Artwork categorization

Hi,

I saw you created (mainly as IP) some new cats recently, like Category:Staatliche Antikensammlungen 1470 e.g. We have had a long discussion on this topic since several monthes here, and there are several recent and relevant questions (see Template talk:Artwork#(Pseudo)namespace or category ?) you could be interested in. Regards, Bibi Saint-Pol (sprechen) 14:28, 20 February 2011 (UTC)