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List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    Re: [Wikipedia-l] Stamps, wiki and copyright
From:       Yann Forget <yann () forget-me ! net>
Date:       2004-08-29 21:43:45
Message-ID: 200408292343.46369.yann () forget-me ! net
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Hi,

Le Sunday 29 August 2004 02:58, Stan Shebs a écrit :
> Yann Forget wrote:
> >
> >While some articles on famous stamps may easily find their place in an
> >encyclopedia, an extensive coverage of stamps seems outside of the scope
> > of Wikipedia. So I would like to know what people think about that.
>
> Don't tease me! :-) I have a database currently describing 146,336
> types to varying degrees of detail, all personally typed in by me
> and copyright-clean, made possible by some special C software that
> handles defaults and integrity checking. This is about half of all
> types in existence. I use it to track my collection, which is an
> unknown size above 68,557 types, since many are in the "other half"
> not yet entered - WP editing has severely cut into my stamp db
> time. :-( The software also lets me do things like download into
> a Palm, so it's handy when I'm out shopping.
>
> Certainly I've thought about how to publish this database, and
> have steered clear of the various obstacles (no use of existing
> catalog numbers for instance) in expectation of being able to make
> it available some day. A wiki project could be a great way to
> finish filling it out, and I even brought it up a while back as
> something that needs a database-editing mode.
>
> There are some technical problems to solve; for instance, I don't
> want to upload data about my personal collection, but if people
> add to the type data, I want to be able to download it and merge
> in - but what if some idiot deleted the record describing one of
> my stamps? I've also started separating the English-language bits
> from the generic data, in the hope of making it multi-lingual.
>
> I'm of two minds about whether it's "encyclopedia data" - certainly
> there are "encyclopedias of postage stamps", with coverage ranging
> from one paragraph to multiple pages per stamp. (When you get into
> designers, the politics, the varieties, etc, it adds up.) On the
> other hand, I've been seeding WP with overview-type philatelic
> accounts for various countries, about two dozen articles so far,
> plus a pile of illustrations, but they haven't generated much
> interest - glaring typos have sat in some of them for months.
> So it doesn't feel like there's a groundswell of demand for
> something even lengthier and more detailed.
>
> But if people like, I could create a meta page with more info about
> my existing data and how it might be usefully wikified, and we can
> continue thinking about it there.

Yes, go for it!
I am very interested to build a free database about stamps.
See http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stamps-sql/
A simple MySQL database with data about 3000 French stamps.
This project was a failure. Probably Savannah is not adapted for this kind of 
project, it's mainly not software, but data.
However I am not sure that Mediawiki is the framework needed for this.

> Stan

Yann

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