User:Jheald/sandbox/Signpost

Phase 1 success
At the end of last year Signpost readers may recall being invited to help to identify images of maps and plans in the "Mechanical Curator" set of a million page illustrations posted to Flickr by the British Library, extracted from 60,000 scanned 19th-century volumes.

The project got underway with an all-day Digital maps Halloween tagathon on October 31 (report, pictures, WMUK blog), and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Rather than 10,000 maps and plans as anticipated, by the end of December over 50,000 had been found, including 20,000 from a single contributor (the computational artist Mario Klingemann) using his own pattern-recognition support software.

The 50,000