I'm pleased to announce that I have finished uploading 10,424 public
domain paintings to the Wikimedia Commons. They are from the DVD "10,000
Meisterwerke der Malerei" (10,000 masterpieces of painting) by "The
Yorck Project" and were donated to the public by Directmedia Publishing
GmbH (of German Wikipedia DVD fame). Directmedia put the collection
itself under the GFDL so there are no lingering copyright concerns.
See the translated original announcement at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmed…
Besides the paintings themselves, as permitted and encouraged by
Directmedia, I have added the metadata from the DVD, which includes
basic data about the individual artists as well as the paintings (much
of it is in German, I've made an attempt to automatically translate
date-related abbreviations). I have also tried to translate the German
style data into English categories.
Credit goes to Tim 'Avatar' Bartel for providing the metadata as a MySQL
dump, as well as the Commons community that was always there to help
when I needed them. Special thanks to Arnomane for creating
[[Template:Information]] and suggesting its usage here. Thanks also to
everyone who provided constructive feedback during and after the process.
You can view all the paintings at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project
Or individual categories, e.g.:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Baroque_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Post-Impressionist_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cubist_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classicist_paintings
Or individual artists, e.g.:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_Gottlieb_Schick
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:El_Greco
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Peter_Paul_Rubens
Note that the "next 200" link on the main Yorck Project category didn't
work until a few minutes ago. The bug that caused this to happen should
now be fixed. However, some individual artist categories with more than
200 images will still have this problem (caused by a second
category-related bug), and it will probably take a few weeks to sort
this out. Meanwhile, there's a workaround:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:The_Yorck_Project&a…
This will show all the images from the Yorck Project starting with
filenames that begin with "Leonardo" (the filename is always of the form
"Firstname Lastname Number"). This way, you can view all the images by
any particular artist, no matter how many.
While all the images are high resolution, the quality of reproduction is
not always the best. Some images have visible compression artifacts at
full resolution, and others are too dark or too bright, for example. (In
fairness, even in these cases, many of the repros you will find on the
web are of still lower quality.) Bdk has started a list of images that
should be replaced with better reproductions:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmed…
I hope you enjoy these works of art, and will help to add the best ones
to the relevant Wikipedia articles. It may make sense to translate the
gist of this announcement into other languages for this reason.
All best,
Erik