User:KMSchmidt/KMSchmidt/Wikipedia Thoughts

11/7/2010

This evening I reviewed articles written for the IUPUI Public Art Collection.

Comments

• The first thing I noticed was a lack of consistency in quality and content between the articles. This fact wasn't surprising, as I remember Jenny Geigel Mikulay voicing her disappointment in last week's readings regarding the quality of some of the WSPA articles. However, what I hadn't anticipated is that a comprehensive article, such as Indiana Limestone or Orange Curves, made me want to go see the artwork in person or pay closer attention to an artwork I had passed on my walk to class (the whole point of this project, no?); on the contrary, a poorly written article made me feel as though the sculpture was boring, or even unimportant. I especially enjoyed the articles that almost read like a story. Little water cooler details -- almost like "Did you know?" factoids -- brought some color to an unfamiliar piece and helped me grasp and retain the information, or even be interested in it!

• It was helpful to have a description of how artists work with different materials, not just a sentence that simply states the artist used x or y materials.

• I noticed some articles using proper right and proper left, but I remember showing up to our Collections Care & Management class on the first day and not knowing what PR/PL was until reading the SOS! handout. Are we assuming here that the average visitor to our page is going to know what we're talking about when we use these terms? Should we be defining this in the article? Or wording it differently?

• It was really difficult to visualize the art works that did not have photographs, such as Give and Take and Antenna Man. I thus expected the visual description of the work to fill in the gaps, but a sentence such as "it is made of stone and is painted yellow" was unsatisfying, especially compared to full-bodied descriptions in articles that did have photographs. As a result, I did not feel compelled to visit campus and seek out these particular sculptures as I did for others documented in the IUPUI Public Art Collection.

Questions

• When do we cite or provide resources? Some of the articles are extensively cited (i.e. 27 references in the Indiana Limestone article) and others go on for sentences or even paragraphs without providing a reference.

• Mother's Helper describes the area around the sculpture, including the mulch and vegetation. Should we include these descriptions of surrounding environments in our articles? In general, I thought more specific locations (i.e. by this small alcove, by this particular door, etc.) was more helpful than simply saying it was on the west side or the north side of a building.

• How do we describe an artwork without breaking the Wiki rule of "no original research"? Similarly, is there a way to describe a sculpture without interpreting it, as in "This looks like..."? For example, in the Indiana Limestone article there is a sentence describing the artwork as "giving the impression of a clam opening." Would this be considered a valid way (in Wikipedia) to describe a sculpture, or is this an example of a personal opinion?

• A general question: When I was reading the article about Broken Walrus, I was wondering about the role of the artist in caring for public art. Are they advocates for their own work? Do artists set standards or expectations of how their art should be cared for, or when their art has lived past its prime? I was just surprised that the Broken Walrus artist was last in line in the upkeep (IUPUI grounds faculty --> Herron Art School dean --> artist) of his own work. Would you really want your name on something that was rusted beyond repair?

11/16/2010

This morning I worked on contributing to a stub article on Maman. It took a long time to even find a public artwork in Iowa that had its own Wikipedia reference, much less its own page. The main problem with the Maman page is that it is missing much of the information about the intentionality and symbolism of the work. This information is found on Louise Bourgeois's artist page under the subheading "Maman," and I don't know if it would be considered redundant to post the information on both pages. Another aspect of the stub article is that it seems to be written for a specific acquisition in the Tate Collection, as it describes a specific height (30 ft.) and date (1999) in its introductory sentence. However, my contribution shows that there is variety both in physical characteristics and creation dates - which suggests that the page is not describing homogeneous spider sculptures. Before I began working on the article there was only one reference included, which referred only to the Tate Collection and not to the other sculptures listed around the world. The trustworthiness of this article (which is currently fairly low, in the 1-2 range) would be improved by adding references about the installation and whereabouts of the other sculptures by Bourgeois. Interestingly, a html link of the map to the Pappajohn Sculpture Park was floating around at the bottom of the page, although no mention was made of the park (and its Spider sculpture) in Des Moines. I reformatted the link, labeled it and placed it under the "External Links" header.

11/30/2010

I am having some difficulty deciding which picture I want to represent the "Here I Grew Up" mosaic, though I plan to incorporate one or two images in the article itself. Unfortunately, the nice black and white photograph of the entire mural in the IMA Library was not taken before 1923, and as I understand it, I'd have to get special permission from the IMA to upload it to Wikipedia (and even after that, image rights would be messy). Since my lens was not wide enough to capture the whole mural, including the parts that are partially obscured by the escalator, I thought it would be most productive to get a good image of each Lincoln figure. But then which Lincoln is most representative of the mosaic, or of Garo Z. Antreasian's artistic vision, or even of Lincoln's time in the state of Indiana? Can one Lincoln figure possibly encompass all these criteria? A few weeks ago I found an article that discusses the claims that various Midwestern states, such as Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, try to have to the "boyhood" or "childhood" of Lincoln while promoting state tourism. Therefore, an image of Lincoln by felled logs or riding horseback may not be unique to Indiana alone. Perhaps my decision should just rely on aesthetic criteria: which angle looks best, which image captured the most detail, and so on.

As for the bust of Daniel W. Voorhees, I contacted librarians from Terre Haute, Indiana and Indiana State University. I was lead to them by a snippet in a article that described a bust of Voorhees given as a gift to the Emmeline Fairbanks Memorial Library in 1906. Very friendly group that seemed interested in our WSPA project. The bust has apparently traveled to different hands in the last century, and now resides at the county historical society. Just this afternoon one of the librarians sent me an image of the bust, and it matches with the one in the Statehouse. A roundabout way of confirming that James Paxton Voorhees was the artist. Will keep continuing the search later this week, but it makes me wonder how many plaster bust copies of Voorhees are floating around the state of Indiana... maybe I should get one! A souvenir!

It's been really helpful to have copy/paste templates, and it certainly speeds up the process and makes the weekly assignments less intimidating. However (and I have a feeling if next year's class were to read this they'd give me a swift kick!), I almost feel like I understand the intricacies of Wikipedia less when I copy and paste templates. To be honest, I don't really even think about what I'm doing; I just know I have to copy, paste, and fill in the blanks. So that's what I do, and I move on. Perhaps it would be of interest to some students to have an early assignment in template making. It could follow the same format as many of the other assignments, which seemed to be designed with the idea of encouraging us to practice using Wikipedia "code." Those assignments helped me get comfortable actually clicking around Wikipedia, rather than reading about clicking around Wikipedia.