Wikipedia talk:List of 100 Art concepts Wikipedia should have

On creating these lists

The intent of this project was to identify the "most important" 100 of each of the topics, and the initial idea was to do this with a kind of empirical evidence, like checking it to other important sources, or through other means.

As no one has been able to do that yet, I'm not sure why User:Johnbod has removed what appears to be all of User:LovedayLemon's additions. Johnbod, in an effort to be more open and communicative, will you put all of those back, please, and then discuss why you don't think they should be on there before they are removed. If we are unable to get an empirical listing of the top 100, then decisions should not be made unilaterally unless by consesus or perhaps by verifiable expertise.

I think these lists are very much works in progress.

Many thanks, and happy listing. --Richard McCoy (talk) 21:01, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I suggest you look at her edits (and my edit summaries) more closely! Removing sculpture & adding crochet is not an improvement in my view. In several cases she has changed the link from blue to red by "changing terminology". She has only about 10 edits, I realize, but I thought it all too complicated to disentangle. Johnbod (talk) 21:05, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Careful, Johnbod: I see no indication that User:LovedayLemon is a woman; I wonder why you say "her"?

But it does appear that this editor is new to WP; perhaps you could be more open and help a newcomer rather than simply removing this person's work. Again, this is a name space article, one that hopes to be a model for cultural sector collaborations. Quickly deleting info with an oblique rational does not come across as friendly. --Richard McCoy (talk) 21:16, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Well maybe, but my main concern was to restore the links she had removed. As to the gender, maybe I'm just intuitive on these things. If you look at the Embroidery and Textile arts templates, you will see we have about 30 articles on types of work and stitches, & clearly not all are needed in a "List of 100 concepts". Johnbod (talk) 23:26, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps I could contribute to this debate. Johnbod, you have no idea how dispiriting it is to go into Wikipedia for the first time in ages and discover that you have acquired a terrier snapping at your heels who then eventually deletes virtually everything you have added. If I have broken any rules please tell me. I think I may have deleted something accidentally but the one deliberate deletion I made was Sculpture because it is a product not a technique. The techniques of sculpture are stone carving, wood carving , polishing, carving, casting,lost wax, etc. I do not understand why you have allowed in linocutting but reverted it from the technique - linocutting - to the product - linocut. I could have deleted one or two others for similar reasons such as pottery which is also not strictly a technique. Some of my changes to the terms that were already there were attempts at providing a bit more precision. I am sorry to sound so pedantic but feel driven into it

You say we have these already. But who is 'we'? Wikipedia? The project? You? Clearly I disagree. Have I misunderstood the task? I thought the project was about finding the top techniques and then getting people to build up content in Wikipedia as a result but you seem to be suggesting that a word like photography or embroidery is enough and stands for a group of techniques within. Because I thought Pottery did not cover pottery techniques I added throwing and slip-casting. Why did you delete these? What is the problem with them? I noticed that a number of the terms I used were red when I looked at the revised list. I was actually naively pleased that I had identified a very significant technique - slip-casting - that did not seem to be covered in Wikipedia. If we are to provide some content that will be really useful to curators and people with an interest in how things are made surely we need to expose these gaps not fudge them. Have I got this wrong?

I notice that you have some kind of hierarchy in your mind because you felt that adding crochet and removing sculpture was a bad exchange. I would hope this project could avoid hierarchy. Before I embarked on making changes I looked at the Wikipedia page on embroidery to discover that it is feeble in the extreme. I added a number of 'female' techniques such as crochet, knitting, canvas work, counted-thread embroidery. What is the problem here? Is it that they do not sit comfortably in the old art history hierarchy (true) or that you do not rate them? The boundary between art and craft is becoming increasingly blured and many artists (male and female) choose to use these techniques today. Why should they be excluded?

You were a little derisive in tone of my inclusion of cameraless photography. This is an interesting technique that was used in the early days of photography by Anna Atkins and Curtis Moffat, in the 1920s by Man Ray and is experiencing a revival with such contemporary photographers as Garry Miller. I think you will find that the Smithsonian has put examples of Anna Atkins work in Flickr Commons. Why do you wish to exclude this technique?

I am very interested in this project and keen to participate but I think you have to allow people a little slack. It feels at the moment very much like there are some people on the inside who have a set of (possibly unwritten) rules that are being applied and that exclude people who are not part of the inner circle. I would like to encourge others to contribute. Some of these may be rather sceptical about Wikipedia. If they get a similar treatment it will only confirm their scepticism but if they could be won round then they may well produce some solid content that would be of benefit to all users of Wikipedia.

I do understand that if you put stuff in Wikipedia you can expect to get it deleted and I can see you are an ardent Wikipedian. I just hadn't expected it to happen so quickly and so completely when I imagined I was acting in the spirit of the project. LovedayLemon 81.147.189.78 (talk) 23:39, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Well I'm sorry you feel like that, & it is not that you have broken rules, but you have to build up an understanding of how WP & it's links work. You have in your mind a distinction between techniques and the products of those techniques but in most cases the Wikipedia article (exactly like the articles in Grove and other encyclopedias) will treat both in the same article, which by convention is usually named after the product. Thus we don't have Tapestry weaving, and probably never will, but do have Tapestry. Likewise Illuminated manuscript and Illumination (of manuscripts), your substitution, and other cases. To take another example, carving, which you added, is a disambiguation page listing 11 articles we have on types of carving, some artistic, some not. You can create WP:Redirects from an alternative name to the actual article if you feel it is necessary. When setting-up links you should always see where they actually go, and if a link comes up red, you should search on the term to see if there is an article under a different name from that you expect, and also try looking via the category system - Category:Artistic techniques, which shows we have several hundred articles altogether, though it is not a very well-organized collection. For example a search on "cameraless photography" very quickly shows that our article is called Photogram - in fact we should have a redirect in place, which I will leave to you as practice. We do in fact have articles on most things, & if we seem not to searches should always be made. We also have Slipcasting, and a section in Ceramic forming techniques. All this comes with experience - there are no unwritten rules, but rather too many written ones to take in quickly. You have been unlucky in making some of your first edits in rather a complex area, and I hope you won't be discouraged. I did start working through your changes individually, but soon gave up - as I hope you can see from the above it would have been very fiddly to sort them all, so I just reverted, & added back the most useful additions on a quick scan. Generally, when you are starting out it is better to concentrate on adding content & be cautious about removing it. Very many first edits get reverted & you should not take it personally, but ask yourself what was, or seemed, wrong about it. Johnbod (talk) 01:54, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Johnbod, I think this project in general has been as you say "unlucky" in that it was meant to be developed as an actual space where people from the cultural sector could be invited to begin working in Wikipedia. The first bit of luck the project ran into was a WP Admin trying to delete it, and now your efforts to point out that WP is a difficult and complex place, one run by more seasoned Wikipedia editors that appear all to willing to delete real efforts without any discussion or helpful insight.

The end result is that Wikipedia again appears to be a place not inviting to new contributions. As the project stands, few experts from the cultural sector are going to want to mess with this project, or be willing to tell their co-workers that they should give it a try. It's more likely to be a frustrating waist of time. If it is desired to have experts from the cultural sector here, than it has to be a friendly, welcoming place to newcomers.

Finally, I don't think we should bend precision of language to meet what is currently within Wikipedia, especially as it relates to cultural heritage--the overwhelming number of articles about anything related to art in Wikipedia are very, very poor. Thus, the point of this project. Let's look at linoleum-block printing, what you call linocut. The AAT preferred term is linoleum-block printing. Likewise CAMEO clearly defines linocut as a product not a process. I don't have access to Grove to be able to verify what it says. I think that the discussion that Johnbodand [[User:LovedayLemon|LovedayLemon] have brought out is a good one: not only are there articles missing, the terminology does not fit the agreed-upon standard terminology. Perhaps this could be added as a goal of the project, to determine agreed-upon standard terminology and create redirects for multiple names. --Richard McCoy (talk) 12:29, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I gave an unwelcoming impression, but as I've explained the edit had multiple problems, and very many people's first edits get reverted with less explanation than I gave. It is not "me" calling the article "linocut", but, as it were "us". However I am sure this is the right title, under WP:COMMON etc (it is also Grove's title), though a redirect from "linoleum-block printing" could certainly be added (CAMEO don't mention this term, but Grove do). Except where there is a lot of material, which there isn't in any of the cases here, technique and product should be, and are, in the same article, as they will be in most reference works. The division of sections in the list is perhaps mistaken for this reason, as most articles in the "technique" section cover product as well, even if the name conceals this, as with engraving etc. There is similar overlap with "materials" in many cases - watercolour, gouache etc. The last thing we want is for this list to set up artificial red-links which might lead people to create unneeded duplicate articles. Grove don't have "cameraless photography" either, even as an alternative name, & say "Photogram" is: "A term once used to describe many forms of art photograph but now the accepted term for all photographic images made without a camera." While it is certainly true that most arts articles are very bad, the way articles are named and arranged etc. does reflect a good deal of collective thought over the years about how encyclopedias are arranged (in general anyway), and this will not always be the same as the way curators have been trained to think. People who come in and just improve articles are much less likely to have edits objected to. That way experience can be built up of how WP works, before moving into more complex areas. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

How many?

Is this list intended to be 100 x 3 or just 100 in total? Or does it matter? Johnbod (talk) 13:22, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

suggestion to better categorize

I understand that the idea for listing the List of 100 Art concepts is to follow an idea put forth by a museum and other reliable sources but I consider it a much more encyclopedic concept to create lists with main categories and then list the more detailed categories underneath. Is it really important to follow the suggestion of a museum to list the top 100 techniques and then find editors disagreeing over what artistic techniques should be included in the top 100? I suggest that the page be organized as follows without limiting the number of artistic techniques. I find that on the actual page many techniques are missing. Please respond all.

Sculpting techniques or Techniques used for sculpture

• carving
• modeling
• casting
• etc.

The same for

painting

• watercolour
• oil
• acrylic
• etc.

Fiber arts

• weaving
• dying
• etc.

Noakk (talk) 09:55, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Again the suggestion above can be applied to the list of materials. The idea of a vital list does not make sense as if we are excluding certain techniques and materials as not important to art, creating art and to artists that use these things.I would love to start the main categories for these pages IF it is agreed to that my suggestion is acceptableNoakk (talk) 10:01, 23 May 2010 (UTC)