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_structur... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books#Edition_item_proper... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books#Work_item_propertie... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hn8VQ1rBgXj3avkUktjychEhluLQQJl5v6WR...
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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