User:CLAvalon/sandbox

My Experience So Far
In the last week alone I have met some amazing people who consider themselves Wikipedians, contributed to helping create new Wikipedia articles for my institution (The Children's Museum of Indianapolis) WP:GLAM/TCMI, created and edited my own Wikipedia page as well as several others and contributed a picture to Wikimedia commons and gotten a sub assignment as the Conflict of Interest Czar. Whew! This has been a crash course in all things Wikipedia, and I have been fortunate enough to get it from some awesome experts like Liam Wyatt and our own Lori Byrd Phillips.

On the IUPUI Public Artworks
It strikes me as I examine the articles generated from the previous classes' effort, that, with few exceptions, the guiding principles of the project, namely to document and create condition reports for all of IUPUI's public artworks, is only half realized. While it is true that all of the artworks do have articles and linked photographs in Flickr only one or two have an actual section devoted to the current condition of the object. There are very detailed descriptions on some articles and much more limited descriptions on others. Some articles have lots of sub-headings detailing the artist's background, the history of the piece, the materials it's made of, and its provenance. Other articles have little more than a brief description of the object and the artist's name. Of the twelve articles I read only Broken Walrus I has any mention of the condition of the object and this object has been destroyed. While I understand the scope and sequence of this project is enormous, I do feel like a bit of standardization on the formatting of the articles, coupled with a general requirement rubric might have assisted with creating a more cohesive finished product. I am personally very excited to not only duplicate but surpass the quality of last year's students' articles. Reading these articles has given me a great deal of insight into what exactly I am searching for pertaining to the provenance, condition, location and documentation of the artworks I am responsible for in this project. It's going to be a lot of work but I am confident the finished product will be worth it. Now I am just itching to start editing my very own articles. So exciting!

Editing the St. Louis Arch Entry
For this week's assignment we were supposed to choose a public artwork in a neighboring city and do some edits following the WSPA Style Guide. I chose the St. Louis Gateway arch. The article was of a median quality, by my estimation I would rate it a 5 or 6 on a 1 to 10 quality scale. I definitely think that there is a great deal of expansion potential in the article. As I began to do some online research I discovered that sections of the article were taken verbatim from a Wikipedia Black Listed website www.squidoo.com. This of course effected my perception of the reliability of this information. I feel like the user who created this article was a bit lazy and just didn't want to have to do any leg work to find out information about this topic. The headings are OK, but I am not sure about the subheadings for the Tram and the Observation Deck I feel like they might need to just be integrated into the Physical description heading. Initially I began by cleaning up and clarifying some of the elements of the article, like making sure it said "the tallest MAN-MADE monument in North America" instead of just the tallest monument. I edited the introduction expanding the entry about why the Arch is so remarkable by including the explanation of its design as a Catenary arch with appropriate Wikipedia article citations. I then expanded the physical description of the monument to include why it is structurally sound and what it's architectural make up is and its weight all cited from a web resource. Then I began to clarify grammar and syntax to make sure the voice of the article was neutral and the voice of the verbs was present tense. I changed a few "had"s to "has". Finally I cited two different sources and created a new sub heading for tourism in St. Louis since this monument has a significant contribution to the city's revenue stream being that it is one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world. I am still concerned that the original author did not paraphrase but simply copy and pasted the material from the squidoo resource I may go back and try to paraphrase later so that copyright issues do not arise. Overall it was fun contributing to an article that will be seen by many millions of people who do a Google search for the ST. LOUIS ARCH. I like reformatting, it makes me feel like I am organizing someone else's chaos. I hope someone does the same for me when I post my article to Wikipedia. Check out my finished article at Gateway Arch.CLAvalon (talk) 17:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Making and Publishing Articles
I have found this experience to be exceedingly rewarding. The research geek in me is having a field day with this project. For my Bust of Governor Ashbel Parsons Willard(neat that I can in text cite that now) I actually tracked down and found original source documents written by Governors who interacted with the artist Henry Dexter and lists of works written by the artist himself which prove the provenance of my object. This information has been lost or unknown in the public for over one hundred years. I felt amazing to bring it to light and utilize it to write my article. When I posted the article live the other night I then did a Google search for a topic that is tangentially mentioned in my article and I was the first hit on Google because I mentioned President Buchanan's portrait bust in the text! SOOOOOO COOOL!

The Coal Miner sculpture has its own unique story and I am learning A LOT about the mining industry to help flesh out my description and history of the piece. I am still in the process of uploading photos, this one will be more difficult because the object's copyright has not expired and so I will have to be more careful of my usage of images in this article. The Ashbel Willard bust was easy because it was created in 1860 so it is officially public domain. Adventures in copyright law soon to come.

The most frustrating thing for me is not being able to find the acquisition forms or commission records for my pieces. I have done hours of research and still have yet to discover any of these documents. I am going to contact Jennifer Hodge and see if she has any leads on where else I might look. I do feel very frustrated by this aspect of the project though. I am also concerned that we cannot do official condition reports for our objects, because I feel both of my objects would benefit from a condition report and conservation assessment, the Gov. Willard bust has some severe wear on the paint which coats the plaster and the Coal Miner is suffering from massive lime deposits from rain fall as well as some rusted bolts at the base of the sculpture. I am not sure how we could record and document these issues to be most effective but I do know that this work needs to be done to preserve these objects.