Gergo,
Thanks for this -- and hoping you have a very productive set of
sessions, to all of you in Berlin this week.
Yes, where one has a derivative work of another Commons work (a
restoration, or a cropping, say), I can see it makes sense to point to
the CommonsData entry for that other work.
But I guess you need to ask yourselves how much of a chain you're
prepared to walk, if that file in turn points to data on an underlying
physical work. Do you extract the "original creator" through the chain,
or link directly? And what if there are multiple original creators?
I don't know whether it makes sense to have "original work" items on
CommonsData rather than WikiData, more generally. (And here I'm talking
about an "original work" in the sense of an original physical old
photograph, or map sheet, or manuscript folio). As someone has pointed
out, there are issues about having to deal with things in two places,
and questions whether it would still be findable, if for example one
were trying to search WikiData for all objects created by a particular
creator.
I think this is something we simply have to defer to you, the technical
designers of the system, for your considered view on what is the best
way forward.
But I would commend some of the discussions at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Visual_arts
to you, not least for some examples file-cases that you might want to
consider, for questions like:
* How to treat engravings from books?
* What "original works" should (or should not) get their own WikiData items?
* Could an edition item on Wikidata be enough to contain all the
relevant information not held on CommonsData about an illustration?
* What if the same engraving appears in different books?
* If there are a number of pictures from a particular scan-set, should
the scan-set have a Wikidata item? (Because there is information we may
want to store about the scan-set, eg its source; and we may want to
filter by it; and sort members of it according to a qualifier, numerical
position in sequence)
Also I would very much commend to you the existing Wikidata schemas for
artworks, for book editions, and for book works, as well as the work
done by the old maps project:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Visual_arts/Item_structure#Describing_individual_objects
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books#Edition_item_properties
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books#Work_item_properties
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hn8VQ1rBgXj3avkUktjychEhluLQQJl5v6WRlI0LJho/edit#gid=0
which already go a long way towards creating a structure for storing
information about many sorts of objects.
Finally, on a more general point, I would beg all of you in Berlin this
week: don't despise wikitext.
It's easy to think that a shiny new system will displace everything.
But there is lots of information, and tools, based on old-fashioned
wikitext that it will need to integrate with for the foreseeable future.
Wikitext is a straightforward API that a lot of content, and a lot of
tools have been built on. So please do think how you can work with
that, rather than simply deprecate it.
Vandal-fighting tools in particular are based on changes to Wikitext, so
please do consider that it would be good to be able to represent changes
in the WikiData or CommonsData in ways that tools based on existing
wikitext file pages can pick up and if necessary revert.
Thanks, and all best for this week,
-- James.
On 05/10/2014 11:14, Gergo Tisza wrote:
Hi James,
thanks for starting this conversation! It is indeed important and has been
overlooked by us.
there seems to be the key assumption that, for any image that contains
information relating to something beyond the immediate photograph or scan,
there will be some kind of 'original work' item on main Wikidata that the
file page will be able to reference, such that the 'original work' Wikidata
item will be able to act as a place to locate any information specifically
relating to the original work.
While we would like to keep track of some sort of "original work" entity
when the file is a derived work, that entity doesn't necessarily has to be
on Wikidata. When a Commons image is the derivative of another image, it
makes more sense to refer to the Commonsdata item of that image. One
possibility would be to generalize that and allow data items on Commons
which are not attached to any file but instead refer to some external work
such as a Flickr image.
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