November 5, 2010
After going through the IUPUI Public Art Collection pages, I'm impressed with the amount of research that went into a lot of the articles. Some were not as well researched and I wondered if part of that was due to lack of resources. Also, some of them didn't have pictures, which I assume is a wikipedia issue. Overall, the articles were a useful summary of the public art on IUPUI campus. Having heard a handful of the horror stories from last year, all of the articles are a testament to perseverance.
Wikipedia is not what I expected as far as the article editing/creating process goes. I've never worked in it before and I'm admittedly technologically ignorant considering my youthful age. I guessed it to be more like a word processor, so I was surprised by the code aspect of creating articles. I'm picking up on it quickly, though, so all is not lost.
I'm excited by the ideas behind Wikipedia, more than I am excited by the code aspect. Allowing wide public access to knowledge, especially knowledge that is generally only taught in academia (including museums) is exciting. I'll be interested to so how the GLAM initiative works out in the long run. It is interesting to come from high school and undergrad, where Wikipedia was a laughable source, to grad school, where I'm now writing articles for a final project.
- I'm interested in seeing how the GLAM initiative works out in the long run too :-) And, I hear you re. the coding stuff - I have great difficulty sometimes too. I'd suggest having a look at some of the Gadgets that you can enable to modify your editing experience - these may help. Go here: Special:Preferences and have a play around, especially the "editing gadgets". Hope that helps. Witty Lama 03:14, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
November 14, 2010
The wiki article on Cloud Gate is extremely in-depth and speaks to the research done by the authors. It also speaks to how much easier it is to write a decent article on a very public piece of art. The references are newspaper and magazine articles as well as internet sites. In the case of my statehouse artworks, there seems to be little research available and an in-depth article will be harder to achieve.
The public artwork I chose to edit for this week's assignment actually had a website and article written about it. The Jim the Wonder Dog sculpture in Marshall, Missouri is a memorial to an actual dog named Jim. The article was a short paragraph with a photo of the park as a whole. The information was accurate and referenced but certainly brief compared to the information available to an interested person. There is a great deal of information on Jim's life and his owner. I was able to add information on Jim the Wonder Dog and a couple sentences on the statue and artist.
The original article had internal links and a couple of reliable internet sources about Marshall, Missouri tourism. There weren't any headings in the original article because there was not a great deal of text. I would rate the article at a 10 for reliability since I knew the information before. If I hadn't known the story of Jim the Wonder Dog, I might have wondered about it a little and would have given it a 7. I love this statue and the story behind it so I was eager to improve the article on wikipedia. The changes I made are as follows:
- added external link
- added more information (referenced)
- added photo (took me a while!)
- added internal links
- reorganized headings
- added infobox (extremely complicated!)
November 28, 2010
I've officially made my articles live and added photos and everything! The articles turned out to be more informational than I thought they would. My first assumption that there would be no information was not entirely accurate. I have been able to find some basic information regarding the Benjamin Harrison Bust and Religious Commemorative Plaque.
The bust was a recent addition to the statehouse so it was relatively easy to get some information on it. I looked up the Indy Star articles that referenced the bust and law that brought about its creation. Benjamin Harrison already has a page on wikipedia so I linked it. I need to go to the IMA to look up the artist Richard Peglow and hopefully add more that section.
The plaque was a little harder to find information on. I was unable to find information on the plaque so I started researching the Meridian Street United Methodists, who commissioned the plaque. That was a more successful route. I went to the Historical Society for information on the church and ended up with a published book on the history of that particular branch, which dedicated a page to the plaque. That's where I have gotten most of my information for the article. I need to go to the State Library to look up the specific dedication date in the Indy Star to see if there is more information.
Technically speaking, I hate uploading photos and I still can't figure out how to do coordinates. Other than that my articles are starting to resemble something useful!