[Commons-l] 10,000 public domain paintings uploaded to Commons

[Erik Moeller]

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_Directmedia

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&from=Leonardo

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_Directmedia/Requests_for_improvement

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