User:Herr0183/WikiThoughts

November 9, 2010: Reflections on WSPA-IUPUI Public Art Collection

As I read the Wikipedia articles about the IUPUI Public Art Collection, I thought about what makes an article effective, in terms of the Wikipedia Saves Public Art project. Clearly, Wikipedia has guidelines about the kind of information an article should include (information that is verifiable, illustrates why the object is notable, etc.). Meanwhile, one of the stated goals of WSPA is to "accurately identify public artworks" with information such as artist, title, date, location and history.

The articles written on the IUPUI collection contain all of this information, for the most part (any lack of information is probably due to the fact that the information was not available). However, a few of the IUPUI articles really stood out to me because they went above and beyond this basic content. For instance, the article on Eve includes a description, information about the artist, location history, and a photo gallery. Perhaps most interestingly, it includes an "Information" section that explains how the statue was nicknamed "Flo" (for Florence Nightingale) by IUPUI nursing students, and that the nursing students of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s loved to take photos with her and dress her up in a nurse's uniform.

To me, this kind of information is important. It makes the article more "readable" (as with museum labels, I think Wikipedia articles that simply rattle off facts are hard to read and easy to ignore). Additionally, if the goal of WSPA is to heighten awareness of these artworks and inspire people to care for them, I think illustrating what these pieces have meant to the community is invaluable. In my opinion, people will be much more willing to care for something that has personal meaning to them, or even comes to have meaning for them through the story attached to it (like Eve and the nurses).

Lastly, if we do attract people's attention by including these little vignettes about the artworks, and we do get them interested in caring for the piece, should including condition information in the Wikipedia articles also be a necessity? I saw condition information for the Mega-Gem article, but did not see it included as prominently in the other IUPUI articles. Does this have something to do with Wikipedia's ban on original research? Is there any possibility of getting around this so that we are able to include this information?

Overall, I think the Wikipedia Saves Public Art project is developing into something really worthwhile. Looking at the IUPUI public art articles has given me some ideas about where I would like to go with my own Indiana Statehouse articles.

November 16, 2010: Hometown Art and Wikipedia

About ten years ago, my hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota took on an impressive public art project: erecting bronze statues of every single U.S. president. The statues have been cropping up on downtown Rapid City street corners ever since, and have garnered quite a bit of attention. Therefore, I was pretty surprised to discover that no one has yet written a Wikipedia article about the "City of Presidents" series. Clearly, that will need to be my next project after the Indiana Statehouse (!). But meanwhile, I was able to find a short section on the series within the larger Rapid City Wikipedia article (under "Arts and Culture"). I added some things and did some cleaning up of this section. I started by fixing some grammatical errors, and revising a few sentences for clarity. I also added three internal links, one for "public art," one for "bronze statues," and one for "American presidents." Finally, I did a quick bit of internet research and found the names of the five South Dakota artists who created the sculptures and added a sentence about them to the section (and again, internally linked their names as well as included my reference at the end of the sentence).

I noticed that the Rapid City article is part of WikiProject South Dakota- an effort to improve the quality of South Dakota coverage in Wikipedia. The article is listed as "B-Class." It is easy to see why, unfortunately. The Rapid City article, and in particular, the Arts & Culture section, is not terribly well-written or cited, but more importantly, it is simply lacking. Because of these things, I did not really trust any of the sparse information about public art in the article, and felt compelled to verify the information before even beginning my edits (my trust rating for the information was about a 3).

If WikiProject South Dakota really wants to improve the quality of South Dakota coverage in Wikipedia, perhaps this project should team up with Wikipedia Saves Public Art to get more articles about public artworks added. Rapid City has a wealth of public artworks, and most, if not all, are notable enough for their own Wikipedia entry. (This is, after all, the town that is home to the most grandiose and most public public artwork, Mount Rushmore.) Yet most of these works are not entered in Wikipedia. This is unfortunate, because I imagine that pieces like the presidential sculptures in downtown Rapid City might inspire people to research on their own via Wikipedia, and it would be wonderful if what they found was an article as complete as the one on Chicago's Cloud Gate.

At any rate, this exercise has certainly illustrated the need for projects like Wikipedia Saves Public Art, which identify and address such gaps in Wikipedia. As Adrianne Wadewitz noted in her recent lecture, this is a meaningful task. Wikipedia is going to become ever more ubiquitous, and it is important that we are stewards of the information we care about in order to ensure that it is not left behind.

November 30, 2010: Article Test Run

This week's assignment has certainly posed some challenges for me, as a decidedly NOT tech-savvy individual. I'm really struggling with all of the codes and quirks in Wikipedia. I'm also struggling with a dying camera, and a lack of information about Alexander Doyle's sculptures.

But first, I will start with my minor victory. After some intense Google-searching, I found a lead on the Matthew Welsh bust. The artist of the bust had not left a signature, and thus, the artist's identity was already slipping away (an ISM database entry listed the artist as unknown). However, I found a blip on a web page indicating the artist was the infamous sculptor Daniel Edwards (he also created the sculpture of a nude Britney Spears giving birth on a bear skin rug!). I then paid a visit to the Indiana State Library, and found an article (via microfilm) in the Vincennes Sun Commercial, not only confirming Edwards as the artist, but describing how the bust was commissioned, by whom, and how it made its way into the Indiana Statehouse. Victory!!

Unfortunately, the process of getting all of the information I found into Wikipedia was much more difficult. I'm really stumbling over all of Wikipedia's codes and quirks. It helps to have access to Wikipedia's and WSPA's various templates and how-to lists, but often those things are so embedded and/or spread around that it takes a significant amount of time just to find the exact instructions I need. I do appreciate that we are working as a team on this project, though. One thing I think might be really helpful is to have one entire class period devoted to working on our articles together- sort of a workshop time in which we could all help each other.