User:Multichill/Generating creator templates
Creator templates are templates at Commons to indicate who made a work. This page proposes a way of generating creator templates.
Creator templates exist since 2005 and evolved over time to the standard indicate who created the work if the person who created the work is notable. The templates include all metadata about a creator in a standard form in a central form. The template contains information like name, date of birth, date of death, etc. We currently have a bit over 10.000 creator templates. This includes most famous painters like for example Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.
If we have freely licensed (CC0) metadata of creators in a structured format it would be possible to import this into Wikimedia Commons. We would have several operations:
- Create : Create a new creator template that doesn't exists already
- Redirect : Creator template already exists under a different name. Create a redirect so we can find it.
- Update : Update an existing creator template with more information
For all these operations to work properly we need some way of searching the creator templates already at Commons. For this we probably need to harvest the current templates into a database like what we're doing for the monuments database or going to do in the future with wikidata. We don't have that yet so we should convince the wikidata people this is a good first start: It's a limited set of pages and the templates are already very restricted. Until then we should do lazy matching: We can just do the "create" operation and if the creator page with the same title already exists, we assume it's the same person. If we create creator templates under a different name for a template that already exists, that needs to be corrected by users.
So far for the technical aspects. Another aspect is who to import? Millions of authors exist, we probably don't want to import all of them. My assumption is that some organization probably already figured out some sort of ranking. I haven't really looked for it so for now I would like to limit it to all painters who died before 1900 who have paintings on display.
Now we just need one or more open data sources to get started.