[Foundation-l] Directmedia update

[Erik Moeller]

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=&namespace=100

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