Contents

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-01/In the media

← Back to In the media

Discuss this story

There has been discussion of the Tate story at Talk:Anthony van Dyck and at WT:WPVA.

It started with a blog post (link) by the art historian Bendor Grosvenor, complaining that Tate should be writing its own short biographies for artists (and so providing job opportunities for young art historians) rather than outsourcing the job. But as his blog post shows, with a link to the Tate's entry on Peter Lely, in the past (link), the Tate has used short biographies from the Grove Dictionary of Art (a commercial provider, so one assumes paid for) but now (link) in many cases (since we think around December 2016) it just uses (with attribution and a link, and for free) the lead section of the Wikipedia biography instead. If this practice spreads, it suggests we should spend more time on creating a good lead section, rather than polishing the body of the article.

Grosvenor also rather trivially complained about the misspelling of "Van Dyck" in the link to our article on Van Dyke beard (as that was the only "error" he mentioned, and deliberately using that variant spelling is not really an error, for the reasons explained in our article on the subject, perhaps this crowdsourced online website that anyone can edit is not doing so bad a job?).

He came back to the subject a few days later (link) to note that the National Galleries of Scotland are also linking to Wikipedia. Separately, he praises art galleries that make images available for free via Wikipedia rather than charging fees for reproduction of images that are public domain (link).

We know that some museums and galleries are linking to Wikpedia as a source of further information already, including the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Galleries of Scotland, and no doubt others too.

Also relevant is this rebuttal from Matthew Lincoln, an art historian and data scientist at CMU, who has actually spent time doing the job Grosvenor wants the art galleries to do. Lincoln encourages curators to avoid spending time and money reinventing the wheel (and indeed undervaluing work not invented here) by (re)writing two or three paragraph short biographies of well-known artists, but rather to deploy their limited resources on activities that add real value to the understanding of the specific works in their collection. You can see the Tate doing that with their online research publications; for example, on Henry Moore: (link). 213.205.251.57 (talk) 11:51, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the further background, IP user. Perhaps you can write a followup piece about this for the next issue (assuming there will be a next issue)? I don't know if The Signpost has ever published an article bylined to an IP user, but it may be worth a shot—especially given the current dearth of contributors. Lastly, I'll also note the recent discussion about this whole matteratJimbo's talk page. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 13:58, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the additional link - no doubt there are more pieces of the discussion on the issue in a few other talk pages - too.

A Signpost article by an IP editor? A tempting offer, but there is not much to add to what I said above, all released on the usual CC BY-SA 3.0 terms, so feel free to make something of it. 213.205.251.57 (talk) 14:56, 1 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

While we're talking about the value and purpose of the Signpost (see the last couple "from the editor" columns), I'd like to express how much I always appreciate this particular section. I really like the curated roundup of Wikipedia news. Thanks, all. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:22, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]