I have now imported some of the artist metadata from the Directmedia "10,000 masterpieces" DVD that was kindly donated to Wikimedia. For this purpose, I have created a new "Creator:" metadata namespace on the Commons. You can see all pages in this namespace at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&...

As you can see, I have written some conversion routines to translate date information from German into English. Other information, however, is primarily in German.

Note that the current bot output still sometimes produces a *de: bullet point when it should not pass any parameter at all to the template, i.e., when the field is blank. For this reason, I have not completed the import, and will run the bot again after this bug is fixed. (Also, the bot didn't have a bot flag, with so many pages, that was very annoying on Recent Changes.)

Before I proceed, however, I ask you to take a look at the current imported pages, and tell me about any other issues with the metadata as it is.

What's the point of this? Simple, using this content, I can now put

{{Creator:Johann Anwander}}

on an image page, or on a gallery page, and get instant metadata information as well as a proper category with sort key. I will add these {{Creator:Xy}} tags to all the uploaded images. This avoids redundancy across different pages where the same information is used, and thereby makes updating and extracting artist metadata easier. Effectively, we are modelling the structure of the relational database using templates (yay, Wikidata without Wikidata ;-).

After the bot run is finished, I will upload a few example images from the DVD, and if that is to everyone's satisfaction, we can go for the full load.

All best,

Erik