Yann Forget wrote:
Hi all,
In the discussion Wikispecies, there were a few mentions of the possibility to enlarge Wikipedia with coverage on postage stamps.
While some articles on famous stamps may easily find their place in an encyclopedia, an extensive coverage of stamps seems outside of the scope of Wikipedia. So I would like to know what people think about that.
Don't tease me! :-) I have a database currently describing 146,336 types to varying degrees of detail, all personally typed in by me and copyright-clean, made possible by some special C software that handles defaults and integrity checking. This is about half of all types in existence. I use it to track my collection, which is an unknown size above 68,557 types, since many are in the "other half" not yet entered - WP editing has severely cut into my stamp db time. :-( The software also lets me do things like download into a Palm, so it's handy when I'm out shopping.
Certainly I've thought about how to publish this database, and have steered clear of the various obstacles (no use of existing catalog numbers for instance) in expectation of being able to make it available some day. A wiki project could be a great way to finish filling it out, and I even brought it up a while back as something that needs a database-editing mode.
There are some technical problems to solve; for instance, I don't want to upload data about my personal collection, but if people add to the type data, I want to be able to download it and merge in - but what if some idiot deleted the record describing one of my stamps? I've also started separating the English-language bits from the generic data, in the hope of making it multi-lingual.
I'm of two minds about whether it's "encyclopedia data" - certainly there are "encyclopedias of postage stamps", with coverage ranging from one paragraph to multiple pages per stamp. (When you get into designers, the politics, the varieties, etc, it adds up.) On the other hand, I've been seeding WP with overview-type philatelic accounts for various countries, about two dozen articles so far, plus a pile of illustrations, but they haven't generated much interest - glaring typos have sat in some of them for months. So it doesn't feel like there's a groundswell of demand for something even lengthier and more detailed.
But if people like, I could create a meta page with more info about my existing data and how it might be usefully wikified, and we can continue thinking about it there.
Stan