Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Loves Art

WLA material at Commons
I am a big fan of WLA and think it is a great way to get more images from GLAM institutions. However as I see it at present the Achilles' heel of the effort is poor quality of the metadata (file descriptions) at Commons and lack of classification. Artworks stored at Commons usually use Commons:template:Artwork and a whole zoo of specialized templates which allow proper internationalization of the file description. They also categorize artworks based on museum, technique, date, artist, subject, and probably many other criteria. Most WLA uploads do not use proper templates or categorize images, resulting in hard to find poorly documented images. See for example the work of formatting single file description, and compare it to the upload of the same image which was a part of Brooklyn Museum mass upload here, which was mostly correctly formatted from the start. I assume that the reason is that large number of people contribute in collecting images but very few are involved in task of formatting the data prior to upload and file categorization afterwards. I think WLA got the data collection part figured out, but should now focus on making current and future uploads more usable. --Jarekt (talk) 17:37, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I partly agree. The WLA images have extremely good descriptions, done by the museums, but the categorization is still very weak - that was supposed to be done by volunteers. In contrast, the Brooklyn metadata is short & frankly very odd in some respects (its the same as on their online database), but there is more categorization, though it is very far from complete, or having what one would think were the most important categories. The ideal would be to take the best points of both. Johnbod (talk) 18:32, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
 * My issue with "extremely good descriptions" of WLA is that it is in text format and not in the format used by Commons, which allows internationalization so German speaker will see description mostly in German and russian speaker mostly in Russian. This " very odd" metadata format, skilfully used by Brooklyn Museum, will allow (future) WLA images from Israel or China to be useful in English Wikipedia. The "descriptions done by the museums" should to be parsed to fill proper fields of template:Artwork prior to upload. --Jarekt (talk) 19:11, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
 * What's odd about the Brooklyn museum descriptions, which are very short, is that they often omit the country and culture of origin, and for example identify all their Persian and Mughal miniatures merely as "watercolour paintings", meaning they were not categorized correctly and would mostly never have been picked up by searches. But in fact what both museums have done is to add the metadata they already had for their own catalogue & website to the uploaded files. That is as much as we can reasonably expect any museum donating many images to do, and unfortunately we don't have the resources, or skill, to format them manually beyond that, & much of the work is beyond bot capabilities. Johnbod (talk) 20:10, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Country and culture of origin is not one of the fields/attributes of Commons:template:Artwork. The only related field/attribute is nationality of the artist stored in Commons:template:Creator so all files using Creator template have that information. As for formatting metadata fields so they comply with standards I agree it is a lot of work but it is faster to do it before the upload than after. I am quite familiar with it since lately I was formatting 22k file descriptions from Web Gallery of Art. It can be done relatively quickly in Excel (at least for 90% of files). One thing which might be helpful is to ask museums to provide metadata in spreadsheet form (as they likely store it) instead of text form. Of course if that is possible. --Jarekt (talk) 19:17, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That is a big problem for European decorative arts (where photos are arguably most needed) and non-European art, where no "artist" is typically known. It is typical of the Commons templates and categories that they assume all art is Western post-Renaissance paintings or sculpture by well-known artists. If you have a Persian miniature, the most important two things you need to know about it are that it is a miniature painting, and from Persia, not that it is a "watercolour painting".  Johnbod (talk) 20:30, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * In fact many people using that box have the sense to add "unknown Italian/Japanese artist" etc to data for anonymous works, but either a "culture" box should be added, or a different template made available for works not by named artists. Johnbod (talk) 02:06, 8 May 2011 (UTC)