Commons:Bots/Requests/BrooklynMuseumBot
Operator: BrooklynMuseum (talk)
Bot's tasks for which permission is being sought: This bot will upload all Brooklyn Museum object images and Library & Archives images that have "No known copyright restrictions". Initial page content will include as much metadata as we have for each image (using {{Information/multi}})
Automatic or manually assisted: The current iteration of this bot will be manually assisted. If we ever run this thing automatically we'll resubmit the request.
Edit type (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): One time run.
Maximum edit rate (eg edits per minute): Bot won't edit more than 10 pages a minute.
Bot flag requested: (Y/N): N
Programming language(s): PHP. Built on [BotClasses.php]
BrooklynMuseum (talk) 21:11, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
Discussion
- Please make a test run. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:23, 10 April 2010 (UTC)
- Uploaded 10. Please let us know how these look: contribs. Thanks! BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
- I think will be good idea:
- to format information template properly (each parameter in own line, space after pipe sign, etc.). It's very hard to edit it in current state.
- to use Creator templates for authors.
- to add author category.
- EugeneZelenko (talk) 14:49, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
- I think will be good idea:
- Uploaded 10. Please let us know how these look: contribs. Thanks! BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
- Template:Painting seems more suitable for these images. Despite being named painting, it's not meant to be limited to paintings, but applied to any work of art. See below for a sample for one of the uploaded images. The sample might needs some edits though.
{{Information/multi}} is rarely used and I suggested at Template talk:Information to retire it. If only one language version is being added, {{Information}} could be sufficient anyways. -- User:Docu at 16:09, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
Henry Inman: English: Mrs. Robert Lowden | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Artist |
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Title |
English: Mrs. Robert Lowden |
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Date | circa 1840 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Medium | oil on panel | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dimensions | 83 × 63.5 cm (32.6 × 25 in) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Collection | Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. W. W. Thayer, | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Current location | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Accession number |
11.549 |
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Notes | Template:Painting-signature | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Source/Photographer | Brooklyn Museum Online Collection; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 11.549_transp6061.jpg | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Permission (Reusing this file) |
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- I agree, that {{Information/multi}} is a rather bad choice. {{Painting}} is the better template. But I made some additional improvements to the example above. These include:
- use of {{Size}} for the size
- use of {{Technique}} for the technique
- use of {{Other date}} for the date
- Additionally the "Gallery" parameter could use {{ProvenanceEvent}}: {{ProvenanceEvent|type=gift|oldowner=Mrs. W. W. Thayer|newowner={{Brooklyn Museum}}}}.
- And the "Source" parameter should be a template too, so the text "Brooklyn Museum Online Collection; Photo: Brooklyn Museum" can be localized. --Slomox (talk) 16:47, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
- Source should probably link the "object record" directly.
- {{Size}} would be good, even {{Technique}} and {{Other date}}, but I skipped these in the sample as it might be easier for the uploader if these are done by one of the other bots (e.g. SchlurcherBot) after upload. If it can be done initially, obviously that would be better.
- I wasn't sure about where to place provenance. Maybe it should be in "Notes". It could hold "markings" and "signature" as well. For the later two, we could create {{Painting-markings}} and {{Painting-signature}} to wrap the text provided.
- We might want to include current tags as well. -- User:Docu at 17:33, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
- I agree, that {{Information/multi}} is a rather bad choice. {{Painting}} is the better template. But I made some additional improvements to the example above. These include:
- Many thanks for the help everyone. Painting does seem like a much better template for these uploads. I modified the bot to incorporate most of the suggestions above. (See File:Brooklyn Museum - Mrs. Robert Lowden - Henry Inman - overall.jpg) A few questions:
- Is there a {{Size}}-like template for 3 dimensions? BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- Are negative integers the best way to indicate BCE years? BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- Frequently works have no known creator but are attributed to a culture (e.g. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/120500 ). Is there a better place than "Artist" for this info? (There's maybe a more general question about how to represent constituent "roles". An "artist" may be designer, architect, calligrapher, and a number of other roles including "culture". See this object for example, which has both an artist and poet. When multiple artists are attributed to a work this info becomes especially interesting. If there's a way to retain this info, please suggest.) BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- The "Gift of __" line shouldn't be taken to imply provenance. That's just a "credit line", which may include donor or other details about the acquisition but we can't provide proper provenance info. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- Many thanks for the help everyone. Painting does seem like a much better template for these uploads. I modified the bot to incorporate most of the suggestions above. (See File:Brooklyn Museum - Mrs. Robert Lowden - Henry Inman - overall.jpg) A few questions:
- {tl|Size}} only supports two dimensions at the moment. But it's no big deal to expand the template to support three dimensions.
- Our date functions do not support dates BC at the moment. "-44" or "-44-03-15" would be my preferred format for dates BC, but I don't know whether the software is able to handle this. Perhaps we need some special template to handle dates BC. I will look into this.
- The "Artist" parameter is the right place even when the work is attributed to a culture and not to a single person.
- I didn't take the "gift of _" line as proper provenance info. I suggested the template {{ProvenanceEvent}} cause it allows localizing the text without creating yet another new template. Perhaps there are other ways to provide the info in a way that as many people as possible can read it. --Slomox (talk) 17:26, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- Ah, I see what you mean now. That's a good point about localization. This is a really tough one for us because we see the benefit of structuring data in that way. But ultimately we're obligated to leave the credit-line as is - even if that hinders accessibility. Shall I just wrap in an {{En}}? Thanks BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:01, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
- You could wrap "gift of" into a specific template (e.g. {{Painting-provenanceorcl}}). This would make it easier to re-use it.
Personally, I'd make this change to link your source record at the place where people are more likely to look for it and include the tags for the image. The tags could either remain red or hidden (sample, to view see here) until we merge them into existing categories.
If all images are "overall" views, we might want to skip this in the filename. -- User:Docu at 11:39, 15 April 2010 (UTC)- The solution for credit-line sounds good. I'm afraid we can't release object tags though. That text is CC-By-NC, not CC-By. See our copyright. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 13:57, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
- You could wrap "gift of" into a specific template (e.g. {{Painting-provenanceorcl}}). This would make it easier to re-use it.
- I updated the bot to incorporate the current set of suggestions and ran it on the current set of contribs. I like the idea proposed by EugeneZelenko of adding artist names as categories. Is there consensus on that? I wasn't sure if that would be appropriate. One note on object titles: I had to remove the {{En}} wrapper because far too many of our objects have non-English titles and we don't have adequate data on languages used. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 21:02, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
- Adding the category of the artist is useful. To some extent, this fills the requirement that the bot's uploads be categorized (in topical categories, not just Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum). As with other metadata, we (at least I) would like to see as many useful categories as possible, but I can understand that there may be a licensing issue on your side. Additional categories you might be able to generate from the description could be a subcategory for Category:Paintings by year and one of the main subcategories of Category:Brooklyn Museum (e.g. Category:Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum, but you could also create additional ones that follow the general way your collections are organized). Maybe the specialists have additional suggestions.
B&W images (identified in the source image name) could also go here.- I see. I updated the bot to attempt to add a few extra categories based on the image data. If the classification and date are both available I attempt to add something along the lines of "Paintings from 1888". Similarly I attempt to add some refinement of the Art-by-location categories. I'm also adding some refinement of "Art from the Brooklyn Museum". See contribs BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:21, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- I will add a category for B&W images after upload based on this. -- User:Docu at 19:31, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- For images of 3D objects, the question about the size template is currently being sorted out (here - maybe a new template {{3dsize}} needs to be created). In addition, I'm not sure if an additional licensing tag should added to these.
- If a corresponding creator template doesn't exist yet, e.g. Creator:Gaines Ruger Donoho used here, it needs to be created at some point. BTW, {{Creator:artist's name}} would only be used if the creator is a person.
- We have very limited data about artists. The best I may be able to do is - in the absence of an existing creator page - add Birthdate and Deathdate params to the Creator template. We only have year data - nothing more refined. And as for location, we often have a "nationality", which may map best to "Workloc", but may actually mean "Birthloc" depending on the artist. So I'm not sure we have a lot to offer here. Thoughts? BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:21, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- Creator pages are created so as we learn more about an artist we can update all files in using this template in a single edit. Any information in addition to the name could be useful to someone. Date of death is especially useful in case of European artists whose works are added based on {{PD-old}} license (PD due to 70 years after death of artist). Dates of birth/death and nationality is a great start. "Nationality" is usually used in "Description" field, for example "{{NationAndOccupation|m|GB|painter}}" would give "British painter" to english speaker or "britischer Maler" to German speaker. See Template:Creator for details.. --Jarekt (talk) 19:46, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- I updated the bot to create stub Creator records for artists that don't already have one. I'm setting Birth- and Deathdate and adding the nationality to the Description. We don't have gender or profession information so I can't use {{NationAndOccupation}} unfortunately. Hopefully some other bot can help out by filling in missing details from other wikis. Let me know if these stubs aren't useful and I'll disable their creation. See contribs BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:04, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
If you do not have profession and sex than please use "{{NationAndOccupation|m|GB|artist}}". Sex will be unverified but hopefully it will be corrected by hand.By the way I rewrote {{Size}} to allow 3D dimensions--Jarekt (talk) 15:23, 20 April 2010 (UTC).- Cool. Thanks, Jarekt. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:45, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- Nevermind about nationality. Your examples are fine and we can correct the templates latter by a bot. --Jarekt (talk) 15:28, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- The creator templates look ok. If the empty fields are added as well, it will be easier to fill them in (manually) later. -- User:Docu at 16:25, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- I updated the bot to include all parameters currently supported by {{Creator}} even if blank - and I updated the handful of stub records thus far created. Anything else? Can we upload another small batch? Thanks. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:45, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, please do, even a larger one. -- User:Docu at 17:59, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- 30 more images uploaded. How are we looking? Changes? contribs BrooklynMuseum (talk) 19:48, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- It looks like if the category for the artist doesn't exist, it doesn't add it. Personally I wouldn't mind if it would add it even if it doesn't exist. Overall, personally, I think it looks good and I'd start uploading. (BTW there is a 100MB limit on uploads (per file). If you want to upload larger files, we would have to ask staff to enable this for you.).
To view how the template looks in various language versions, I added a set of links here. -- User:Docu at 21:02, 20 April 2010 (UTC)- That is the case, yes. I only apply an artist category if the category exists. We have a lot of unique artists that may never be categories in the Commons, so I assumed that was the right approach. I can revise if the consensus is that artist category references should be added even if the category doesn't exist. I just don't want to create a bunch of dead-end links..
- I don't think anything slated for upload comes near 100M, but that's good to know. Thanks. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 22:06, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- If there is a creator template for an artist, I think there should be a category too. -- User:Docu at 03:32, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- I agree with Docu ideally all creator templates will belong to a category with the same name. Same goes for images they should be in by author categories as well. If the category does not exist I would add it anyway, since those categories will be created shortly. --Jarekt (talk) 03:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Bot has been updated to add artist category regardless of category existence. I'll re-run to update all contribs to date as soon as the signature template question below is sorted. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- BrooklynMuseum, FYI, I went through all the creator pages you have created and added whatever info I could find about them based on English and German wikipedias. I 2 or 3 cases commons already had categories about the authors but using slightly different version of the name. I renamed 2 creator pages to match name already used, but left redirects so call using either version of the name will work. --Jarekt (talk) 19:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Cool, thanks. I added logic to suppress adding an artist category if it appears to have already been added by someone else with a different spelling.BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:56, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
- BrooklynMuseum, FYI, I went through all the creator pages you have created and added whatever info I could find about them based on English and German wikipedias. I 2 or 3 cases commons already had categories about the authors but using slightly different version of the name. I renamed 2 creator pages to match name already used, but left redirects so call using either version of the name will work. --Jarekt (talk) 19:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Bot has been updated to add artist category regardless of category existence. I'll re-run to update all contribs to date as soon as the signature template question below is sorted. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- I agree with Docu ideally all creator templates will belong to a category with the same name. Same goes for images they should be in by author categories as well. If the category does not exist I would add it anyway, since those categories will be created shortly. --Jarekt (talk) 03:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- If there is a creator template for an artist, I think there should be a category too. -- User:Docu at 03:32, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- It looks like if the category for the artist doesn't exist, it doesn't add it. Personally I wouldn't mind if it would add it even if it doesn't exist. Overall, personally, I think it looks good and I'd start uploading. (BTW there is a 100MB limit on uploads (per file). If you want to upload larger files, we would have to ask staff to enable this for you.).
- 30 more images uploaded. How are we looking? Changes? contribs BrooklynMuseum (talk) 19:48, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, please do, even a larger one. -- User:Docu at 17:59, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- I updated the bot to create stub Creator records for artists that don't already have one. I'm setting Birth- and Deathdate and adding the nationality to the Description. We don't have gender or profession information so I can't use {{NationAndOccupation}} unfortunately. Hopefully some other bot can help out by filling in missing details from other wikis. Let me know if these stubs aren't useful and I'll disable their creation. See contribs BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:04, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
- Creator pages are created so as we learn more about an artist we can update all files in using this template in a single edit. Any information in addition to the name could be useful to someone. Date of death is especially useful in case of European artists whose works are added based on {{PD-old}} license (PD due to 70 years after death of artist). Dates of birth/death and nationality is a great start. "Nationality" is usually used in "Description" field, for example "{{NationAndOccupation|m|GB|painter}}" would give "British painter" to english speaker or "britischer Maler" to German speaker. See Template:Creator for details.. --Jarekt (talk) 19:46, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- We have very limited data about artists. The best I may be able to do is - in the absence of an existing creator page - add Birthdate and Deathdate params to the Creator template. We only have year data - nothing more refined. And as for location, we often have a "nationality", which may map best to "Workloc", but may actually mean "Birthloc" depending on the artist. So I'm not sure we have a lot to offer here. Thoughts? BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:21, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- Adding the category of the artist is useful. To some extent, this fills the requirement that the bot's uploads be categorized (in topical categories, not just Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum). As with other metadata, we (at least I) would like to see as many useful categories as possible, but I can understand that there may be a licensing issue on your side. Additional categories you might be able to generate from the description could be a subcategory for Category:Paintings by year and one of the main subcategories of Category:Brooklyn Museum (e.g. Category:Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum, but you could also create additional ones that follow the general way your collections are organized). Maybe the specialists have additional suggestions.
- That being said, the 10 initial uploads look good to me and I'm looking forward to see more of them. -- User:Docu at 11:30, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Another possibility is to use a custom template similar to Template:Fotothek-Description with highest granularity possible and we can map it to a proper fields in {{Painting}} and other templates. BTW, BrooklynMuseum please add {{Babel}} to your userpage, so other people can see what languages you speak. Also may be mention your official association with the museum. --Jarekt (talk) 19:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
- I thought about it some more and IMO ideally bot can create pages similar to Slomox examples. However if some of the data parsing gets too complicated second best solution would be for the bot to create templates like
{{Brooklyn Museum Description
|Artist name= William Jacob Baer
|Artist nationality=American
|Artist DOB=1860
|Artist DOD=1941
|Medium= Oil on canvas
|Date= 1911
|Dimension1 cm=76.1
|Dimension2 cm=30.2
|Signature= Signed lower right: "Wm. J. Baer/ 1911"
|Collections= American Art
|Museum Location= This item is not on view
|Accession Number= 11.523
|Credit Line=Gift of Walter H. Crittenden and William A. Putnam
|Title=Daphne
|Record Completeness= Good (75%)
|Link = http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/5/Daphne
}}
- (this one was filled with File:Brooklyn Museum - Daphne - William Jacob Baer - overall.jpg info) and we can write {{Brooklyn Museum Description}} in such a way as to create something looking like Slomox example. The parameters to the template can closely reflect internal data structure of the database which likely is storing this info at the moment. --Jarekt (talk) 20:16, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
- This other approach seems ok to me as well. Please choose it, if it's more convenient for you.
- For the tags, you might want to use [[:Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum, tag <tagname>]]. No need to create the category description pages though, we can merge them into existing categories (or remove them) after upload. -- User:Docu at 10:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Template:Painting-signature
I saw Template:Painting-signature is used for the uploads. In the form {{Painting-signature|Signed lower right: "Wm. J. Baer/ 1911"}}. That should rather be {{Painting-signature|Wm. J. Baer/ 1911|lower|right}} with the position as two separate parameters. That allows further localization. --Slomox (talk) 01:01, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Oh, and now that I wrote this: we actually have this already: {{Signed}}. (The problem sounded kinda familiar to me ;-) ) --Slomox (talk) 01:04, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- I'm aware of the template, but it might be easier to do this after the upload. -- User:Docu at 03:32, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Judging from the discussion so far I'm impressed how well BrooklynMuseum was able to deal with integrating all the obscure Commons templates we asked him to integrate. He seems to be quite skilled. So I'm positive he'll be able to adjust the bot. Of course handling it with a bot afterwards is okay too. --Slomox (talk) 10:36, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Maybe you should attempt to write a documentation for the template before asking for that. -- User:Docu at 10:40, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Judging from the discussion so far I'm impressed how well BrooklynMuseum was able to deal with integrating all the obscure Commons templates we asked him to integrate. He seems to be quite skilled. So I'm positive he'll be able to adjust the bot. Of course handling it with a bot afterwards is okay too. --Slomox (talk) 10:36, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- I can attempt to parse signature text and location from our 'signed' field and place in either of the mentioned templates. Our "signed" data is pretty irregular - with lots of different conventions and exceptions - so I may not be able to parse all perfectly. Just let us know which of the two mentioned templates is best. It doesn't look to me like {{Painting-signature}} displays the position info I pass in..
- While I'm at it I'm going to remove the signature entirely if it reads "unsigned" or similar, but let me know if the verified absence of a signature is actually interesting data. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:57, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Please use {{Signed}}.
- In my opinion the verified absence of a signature _is_ interesting data. Please include it. --Slomox (talk) 17:41, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- Fair enough. But how should the lack of a signature be communicated? {{Signed|signed=Unsigned}} is a troublesome convention as it only makes sense for EN speakers and presents a problem for any artwork actually signed "Unsigned". (Some artist is bound to do it.) Is there some other template param I can use? BrooklynMuseum (talk) 15:11, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
- With a #switch-statement we can parse a value like "|signed=Unsigned" so it will also make sense to non-EN speakers.
- If "Unsigned" could be an actual signature, we could either use something like "|signed=-" (or any string of characters that would never be used as a signature) or we could add another parameter "|unsigned=1". I guess the second solution is simpler. I'll implement it in the template. --Slomox (talk) 08:44, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
- Looks good. I updated all unsigned objects uploaded to date to use the new unsigned=1 switch. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 21:22, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
- Ok, when do you plan to upload? -- User:Docu at 04:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
- How about I start uploading 1000 at about 1330 GMT tomorrow (Wednesday 28th)? --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:45, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
- Sounds good. --Jarekt (talk) 20:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
- It sure does. -- User:Docu at 05:22, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
- 1000 uploaded. I'll wait to upload more until some of these can be reviewed. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 14:35, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- See Bottom of the page. --Jarekt (talk) 15:41, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- If the artist is unknown, you might want to use "|Artist={{Unknown}}". Currently the line seems to be skipped (e.g. here). -- User:Docu at 10:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, current uploads leave the Artist field blank if no suitable constituent is available. I've revised code as suggested - to go into effect next update. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 21:15, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- 1000 uploaded. I'll wait to upload more until some of these can be reviewed. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 14:35, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- How about I start uploading 1000 at about 1330 GMT tomorrow (Wednesday 28th)? --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:45, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
- Ok, when do you plan to upload? -- User:Docu at 04:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
- All contribs to date have been updated to use {{Signed}} template with location and date info passed in as parameters where available. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Thoughts from afar
I'm very impressed with ambition and scope of this project, and everyone's commitment to make it work, in particular the Brooklyn Museum's willingness to put so much content into Wikimedia Commons.
I'm very much a non-technical expert when it comes to understanding how bots and templates work, and therefor enter this discussion with trepidation, but perhaps my outside perspective would be of use.
I'd like to point out that this seems like an ideal time to not only solve the necessary issues required to make this bot work for the Brooklyn Museum, but also to clear the way for institution to do a similar thing. You all have done a great deal of this by making the painting template so that it can handle the standard museum practice of measuring in 3 dimensions (HxWxL). It was only recently that a similar change was made to the WP Template for artworks.
I wonder what it would take to change the name of the template you are using from "painting" to something like "artwork." As a museum professional, I know a lot of people are very particular with how artworks are named. It would be more straightforward to generally describe them in the template rather than name an etching a painting. A more generalized template would also recognize that the Commons is interested things other than just paintings, which for so long have been at the top of the Fine Arts food chain.
Likewise, I think the more specificity the better when considering the credit line of artwork. Sometimes artworks are actually given to museums by specific people, and then other times pots of money are given to a museum which are then used to buy artworks (sometimes this is done very specifically, with certain funds being allocated to very specific kinds of artwork purchases).
Credit lines rarely relate to a significant amount of provenance information, and since it says the word "provenance" in the template, this might confuse some people.
Further, the name or info in the credit line might actually make an interesting category--in this way one could easily see groups of artworks from particular donors. I think putting this in the "notes" section is a bit to general. Museum folks spend a lot of time making sure gifts are properly credited. In my opinion, a notes field would be best used for other information and a specific credit line field should be created.
In the same way I think the ID field could be better described. The acquisition number of an artwork is not only the control number we use to track artworks in museums, but usually relates to the year it was acquired by a museum. The general system now is to have (year acquired.sequential item number). Though it's not always the rule the year acquired can also mean the year the artwork entered the museum. This too might make an excellent category. It would be interesting to be able to group artworks by their accession years.
I hope you'll take my suggestions in the good way I mean them. Here's to you all and the excellent work that you are doing. --Richard McCoy (talk) 12:50, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- From a technical point of view renaming {{Painting}} to {{Artwork}} is no problem at all. Can be done in a minute. But if it is done we should take the opportunity to review the template and have a look what kind of additional data needs to be included (a statue or installation might have different data requirements than a painting).
- I have no knowledge about museal standards at all. If IDs with the scheme "year acquired.sequential item number" are indeed some kind of common standard, we should create a template for it. --Slomox (talk) 17:57, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
- These suggestions generally make sense to me. In particular, it would be great if the template was named {{Artwork}} and a credit_line parameter was added.
- As for accession numbers, I agree that calling out acquisition year would be interesting, but I think this would be best handled separately from the museum id. Most of our ids follow the pattern [year].[number], but many do not and I think it would be unwise to assume too much about other museums'/collectors' conventions beyond that they use some kind of "id". So, ultimately I think "ID" is adequate as is.
- To enable grouping by acquisition year, perhaps something like "As of date" could be added to Current Location, from which other bots could derive categories like "Artwork acquired by museums in the 1970s". --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 17:26, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Organizing Bot uploads
It seems like as promised Bot is active uploading numerous images and creating creator pages. Help is needed to further categorize the uploads and verify category/creator names.
- Categories: I created Category:Brooklyn Museum categories to check and its subcategories based on names of new Creator pages. Those categories need to be verified that they are not alternative names of people-categories we already have. They also need [[to be added to categories like category:Painters from the United States. Afterward Category:Brooklyn Museum categories to check can be removed.
- Creator pages: Most of BrooklynMuseumBot creator pages have only very minimal information. I added Sortkey and Homecat fields to most of them, I will add it to the other ones in Category:Creator templates without key information. All Creator pages need to be verified that they are not alternative versions of the pages for authors we already have creator pages for. It is also useful to link this page with English or other Wikipadia article about the artist (by adding link in the name field), and see if the article need any aditional samples of the author's work, and if the image of the author is available.
- Files: Could use additional categories.
- Now that 1000 have finished uploading I'm going to go back and see if there are more categories that I can auto generate based on technique. If there are other types of categories that anyone thinks I should be able to generate based on metadata, please suggest. Thanks --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 14:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
--Jarekt (talk) 13:46, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
- I will try to fetch data from en_wiki for these categories Done
- I think overall this turned out well. Personally, I think we could move ahead with the remaining ones. Later, we might want to announced the upload on VP/Main page to invite users to categorize the files further. -- User:Docu at 10:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- I am (very slowly) checking those categories as well many of them are parallel to already created categories and/or Creators. In those cases I am creating redirects. I agree with Docu that this run went quite well. Some thoughts and comments:
- This edit was quite destructive, but it looks like one-of-a-kind.
- Ouch. That was nasty indeed. I believe this arose due to a connectivity failure that my code interpreted as page nonexistence. I've revised my code to look specifically for the 'missing' flag to verify the nonexistence of pages. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- I am (very slowly) checking those categories as well many of them are parallel to already created categories and/or Creators. In those cases I am creating redirects. I agree with Docu that this run went quite well. Some thoughts and comments:
- As someone mentioned before most files end with "- overall", may be it can be trimmed.
- That suffix is the image view - something to identify the image from other images of the same artwork. But since we're only uploading one image per artwork I'll remove it from subsequent uploads. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- I found it surprising that a lot of images of paintings are in black-and-white. In case you have access to Color and B/W versions a color version would be better
- I wish more of these were color too. We're uploading the best image we have. You can verify this by clicking the Online Collection link, which shows all images available for the given object. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- May be you can use {{NYC}} instead of {{city|New York}}. {{City}} is a big lookup table and it looks-up {{NYC}}.
- Sure thing --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 20:21, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- The last 3 point are quite minor and I would not worry about them if they are not easy. --Jarekt (talk) 15:13, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Some remarks
I changed the template to make it look like the other templates. I added {{PD-art}} to all of the paintings and removed the redundant Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum (is added by {{Brooklyn Museum-no known restrictions}}). Could you add a placeholder template to new uploads ({{Brooklyn Museum-Replace with Commons license}} or something like that?) so it's easy to track which images still need a Commons license template? Also adding Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum to new uploads is redundant.
It all looks very good. Would you be willing to share your work so other users/institutions can benefit from your work? I'm especially interested in how you mapped fields in your database to fields in our templates.
I also like to concept of seeding creator templates with information from a museum database. This is something we should probably look into some more. Multichill (talk) 19:54, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
- Could you double check the {{PD-art}} you applied? It seems you added this indiscriminately to all uploads, e.g. also at File:Brooklyn Museum - Landscape - Owen Cullen Yates - overall.jpg. Please be more careful. -- User:Docu at 12:11, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
- Because Brooklyn Museum was supposed to be only uploading public domain works. How is this work public domain? Multichill (talk) 22:06, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
- It's really for you to tell us, as you tagged it. You might want to re-read this request, their template, and the discussion here. At least, this file was of a 2D-object. -- User:Docu at 11:20, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
- I removed {{PD-Art}} from all the files where author died less than 70 years ago. Also should {{PD-Art|PD-Old}} be used for US artists? US does not recognize {{PD-old}} rule. For most Brooklyn Museum uploads we should use {{PD-Art|PD-US}} is applicable. Does anybody know that "published" means when referred to paintings? --Jarekt (talk) 03:52, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
- I saw one such file in one of the categories I was watching, and I raised a similar question at COM:VP#Brooklyn Museum-no known restrictions (about 55 files seem to remain copyrighted in the USA as unpublished works). Teofilo (talk) 10:44, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
- Lets not call those files "copyrighted" (people have bad reactions to those) and I trust {{Brooklyn Museum-no known restrictions}} assertion as much as I would {{Flickr-no known copyright restrictions}}. I was only commenting that {{PD-Art}} = {{PD-Art|PD-Old}} might not be a correct license for majority of Brooklyn Museum uploads which are works of US painters. --Jarekt (talk) 13:36, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Few more suggestions about Creator pages
Hi as I am still checking Category:Brooklyn Museum categories to check and merging with existing categories. I noticed 2 things which may be can be improved prior to further uploads:
- If no information is known about a creator other than name than lets not create a page for him/her. I deleted about 5 of those.
- Looks like you also deleted a creator page that had only one year (J. Hall, active ca 1850). I've added logic to skip creator page creation if only one date is known. -BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:20, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
- Occasionally Brooklyn Museum do not know dates of birth / death of an artist but knows what years was he/she active. Put those dates in Workperiod field instead of birth/death dates, for example for creator:George Hayward. For example here.
- I've added this logic and I'm currently applying the change to all creator pages uploaded to date. -BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:20, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Other than that uploads look great. Thanks--Jarekt (talk) 03:55, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
- Few more comments:
- Few creator pages I deleted can be characterized as not having enough detail to pinpoint someone's identity with much certainty. For example I deleted "J. Hall, active ca 1850" mostly due to lack of first name and no birth/death names. Even if I have a second image claiming to be by "J. Hall, active ca 1850" it would be quite uncertain that they are the same person. As a result the category would have only this one image and there is no way to properly categorize it.
- Many of your recent changes to creator pages were not right. For example, this change was incorrect, since your page lists "American, 1727-1791, active in America 1746-1776" as author description. The correct change is this. Also at this point I verified all the Creator pages by hand, in most cases based on the other sources (like en wikipedia), so please verify changes to those creator pages by hand as well.
- Another detail I noticed is that if one of your dates say "ca. 1900" than it is better to use {{other date|ca|1900}} instead of 1900.
- While verifying those new creator pages and their categories, in a few cases I fixed your dates, added places of birth/death, added categories and pictures of the artist and merged creator directories with existing directories we occasionally had for each creator. I also verified interwiki links between creator categories and wikipedia articles added by a bot; to my surprise large fraction of those were linking to an incorrect person this the same name. In few cases when I changed the name of creator page or category I kept redirects from the names you used. So you can keep on using the old ones. In case of creator pages we just will have pages with several versions of the name pointing to the same single creator page, and in case of categories if you add an image to a redirected category than this image will be at some point moved to a correct one. Greetings --Jarekt (talk) 19:50, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
- Few more comments:
More uploads?
Are there going to be any more uploads or is it all that Brooklyn Museum can share at the moment? --Jarekt (talk) 17:08, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
- Hi all. Sorry for the delay. I'm getting my head back into uploads now and doing my best to incorporate the above suggestions. I'll write again when I have a batch to share. Hopefully this week. Best. BrooklynMuseum (talk) 21:08, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
Page Deletions
- Am I mistaken, or have a number of bot uploaded pages been deleted? Should action=history tell me whether or not a page was deleted (e.g. [1]) Is there a way to determine whether this page ever existed or I just mistakenly logged an upload that actually failed? (And if the page did once exist, how do I determine the reason for the deletion?) Thanks BrooklynMuseum (talk) 16:09, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- Normally you should be notified if a file is nominated for deletion. It seems that wasn't done here though.
- Red links on the upload log show images that were deleted.
- The following seem to have been deleted:
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Self-Portrait - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Study for 'The Wounded Drummer Boy' - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Sharpening the Scythe - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Not at Home - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Self Portrait - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Captain Folger of Nantucket - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - The Savoyard Boy - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- File:Brooklyn Museum - Portrait of a Child - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
- Probably these were deleted by error and an administrator, e.g. Jarekt, could easily restore them. The deletion log displayed when clicking on the above links should explain why they were deleted, but the log for the ones I checked wasn't helpful.
- was deleted as a duplicate of File:Dabo - Silver Light Hudson River 1911.jpg. -- User:Docu at 16:25, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- In the meantime the ones from Eastman Johnson were undeleted. -- User:Docu at 20:08, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- Strange I can not find any info about deletion or undeletion of the Eastman Johnson files. Probably just my inability to use the admin tools. :) --Jarekt (talk) 21:30, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- The "log" link is now folded behind the right to "view history" (nothing admin about that). -- User:Docu at 21:44, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks --Jarekt (talk) 02:40, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
- The "log" link is now folded behind the right to "view history" (nothing admin about that). -- User:Docu at 21:44, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
- Strange I can not find any info about deletion or undeletion of the Eastman Johnson files. Probably just my inability to use the admin tools. :) --Jarekt (talk) 21:30, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
Categories
I've categoriseg many of the paintings of the musuem by genre. I'm aware this can't be always relevant, but given the number of paintings, I thought smaller categories could be useful. Since the works of the museum seems to be organised by collections I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea if the bot added categories like "American arts in the Broklyn Museum", "Arts of the Pacific Islands in the Brooklyn Museum", according to the museum's name of the collection to which the item belongs--Zolo (talk) 09:36, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
- If there's consensus that this would be useful, we're game. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 13:38, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
- Support --Jarekt (talk) 20:56, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
- Sure, Multichill (talk) 16:11, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
- Ditto. Jean-Fred (talk) 16:23, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
- Cool. Thanks. New uploads are now being tagged with collection categories. --BrooklynMuseum (talk) 19:11, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
Some other remarks
Though I followed from afar the discussions of this last months, I am kinda new to this discussion. So first of all, thanks Brooklyn Museum for sharing all this content, and congratulations for managing to make so much metadata fit into our myriad of templates!
I would have two remarks:
- I noticed that the
Source
field does not use a template. Though there is not much to internationalise, this hinders this possibility. It could also be helpful in the case the URLs of the BrooklynMuseum change in the future.
- Interesting. Are you suggesting a new template be created? If guidelines are provided, we can adapt new uploads.--BrooklynMuseum (talk)
- I think it would be interesting, yes ; but I would appreciate some comments from other, more experienced users before (hint, hint). Jean-Fred (talk) 19:49, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
- Would something like {{SourceBrooklynMuseum}} do? Visually, it doesn't change much. You have to fill a template with
- I think it would be interesting, yes ; but I would appreciate some comments from other, more experienced users before (hint, hint). Jean-Fred (talk) 19:49, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
- address (page address less minus "http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/")
- ID=blabla.jpg
- date=date (given)
- For an example, see File:Brooklyn Museum - "Eh Bien monsieur le marquis de Guizot..." - Honoré Daumier.jpg. I've considered that the photographer is always the Brooklyn Museum, if it is not the case, and if the template suits you, I can change that.
- Many artworks are categorised in Category:Oil paintings, but this category does have sub-categories for the type of base (eg Category:Oil on panel, Category:Oil on canvas). I believe either these categories are not relevant and then we need to trim our category tree, or they are and it would be great if the BrooklynMuseum could sub-categorise them in future uploads (previous uploads could be fixed by bot based on the {{Technique}} used). I guess this decision is in the hands of folks who know best the practices of artworks categorisation :-)
- It may a be a somewhat tricky question. Actually, artwork categories of commons don't really follow any consistent rules. On the whole, it seems better to categorize files in the most precise category available. However it should be noticed, that, unlike "category:oil on canvas", "category:oil paintings" has thematic subcategories (Category:Oil paintings by subject) I am not sure it perfectly logical, but that the way it is for now. Thus when a painting is put in "category:oil on painting", it presumably has a greater chance to end up in a more precise thematic category than when it is categorized in "oil on panel". One solution would be to categorize the files in both categories, but that would be considered redundant. An alternative is to keep things as they are and run a bot later to categorize files in catgories like "oil on panel" (I think it's quite easy to do and would probably be useful for files from other sources as well). Personnally, I don't hold any strong opinion on that question.--Zolo (talk) 22:07, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
Jean-Fred (talk) 11:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
New uploads-new suggestions
I have seen that uploads had resumed this is great news!
Since template have changed a bit since last time, I would like to suggest a couple of minor changes:
- We now have a "location" field meant to be for "location within the museum". I propose to create a template:Brooklyn Museum location where we could put curatorial department and the number of the room (except if it changes to quickly to be maintainable here). Maybe it could even be used for automatic categorization, the name of the department is not always that intuitive, if it was automatically added, it may prevent good faith mistakes from users.
- As Jean-Fred mentioned above, it may make sense to have a template for the source. Would something like {{From Brooklyn Museum}} used in File:Brooklyn Museum - "Eh Bien monsieur le marquis de Guizot..." - Honoré Daumier.jpg do ? Since there also is a link in the accession number field, maybe it would be a good idea to have a template there two.
- two really minor changes, if new uploads are to be expected: {{Painting-provenanceorcl}} is now called and
|Institution={{:museum:Brooklyn Museum}}
can now be written|Institution={{Institution:Brooklyn Museum}}
--Zolo (talk) 18:23, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I also noticed that BrooklynMuseumBot is creating new Creator pages. This is great but the format of the creator template changed slightly since last uploads: we now have more fields which should be added even if empty. See Template:Creator "Copy and paste section". Ideally bot can fill some of those new fields. I can also offer help uploading new creator templates if you can provide spreadsheet with authors names and fields. --Jarekt (talk) 18:40, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
- If I may suggest images of reliefs of TT34 for upload? -- Docu at 19:07, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Summary
I think approval of this bot is way overdue, especially since most of the uploads are already done. Despite of the lengthy debate, or may be thanks to it, I consider uploads of this bot to be much more clean than the most other bot or manual uploads. Unless there are some specific issues or reservations I think this discussion should be closed. --Jarekt (talk) 17:05, 2 June 2011 (UTC)