User:Ebduval/WikiThoughts

The IUPUI Public Art Collection and its advocacy on Wikipedia is a neat idea. My first semester on campus, I would often pass the East Gate / West Gate sculpture near the library and wonder what it was supposed to represent. I have noticed that several of the articles done last semester were quite basic information and didn't go very deep into meaning, although it's possible that the information just isn't available. Especially for the more abstract designs I would like to know more about what they are supposed to represent instead of just what they look like.

I'm not entirely sure how the Wikipedia project relates very well to Collections Care and Management - I wonder if it would be better for an art history or a new media class. Yes, these pieces are part of the Indiana Statehouse collection, but what are we learning about how to effectively care for or manage this collection through this project?

11/16

Consider the following: What is the Assessed Quality of the article (if any)? Does it have tags? How good are the references? How clearly laid out are the headings? On a scale from 1 to 10, how much did you personally trust the information in the article? Why?

The Cloud Gate article is very extensive! It's nice that so much information about it is known. I think it is much easier for modern sculpture, esepcially when the artist is still living and may have a website or given interviews about the subject.

I chose to edit the article about a statue of Benjamin Harrison which is located in University Park. I chose this specific sculpture because I am a volunteer docent at the Benjamin Harrison Home, which has a small copy of the statue in the house. The article was little more than a stub with some very basic information about the statue - most of which could be discerned through pictures ("the statue is bronze, the base is limestone"). There was a tag for a reference to the Smithsonian Institution, and I was able to pull off more information from that site that wasn't originally in the article. Because the amount of information was so sparse, there was scarcely a need for separate sections. I would give the article a "Trustability" rating of 7. The information in the article could be verified through references or what I personally already knew about the statue, but the lack of information left something to be desired.

11/30

I had a lot harder time with today's assignment than I thought I would...I got so frustrated I cried. While I enjoyed taking the pictures, I forgot to check the assignments page for how to upload them to Wikipedia and spent a lot of unnecessary time looking elsewhere for directions. Oops! Totally my fault for being a doofus. I feel very overwhelmed by Wikipedia, just because if you need to know how to do something there are about 15 million different ways to do it and I can never decide which way is more "right" than another, and the amount of the same information said in several different ways is just so incredibly vast that it starts to get quite confusing. Not ever having worked with HTML code before, I find it a bit scary. I'm all for learning as you go, but I definitely could have used someone to help physically walk me through it instead of reading a bunch of directions. I tried adding additional information to the infoboxes but when I clicked preview the information didn't show up. I still get a little freaked out about all the copyright issues and whether or not I should really be uploading pictures of these sculptures. It was, however, exciting to make the articles live.