Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings

The WikiProject sum of all paintings is a WikiProject to have a Wikidata item for every notable painting.^*

Background

On Wikipedia we have a lot of experience breaking down large amounts of work into smaller chunks that can be completed. Examples of this are the windmill project on the Dutch Wikipedia and the many lists of historic buildings that were created for Wiki Loves Monuments (Q1353202). For paintings we can use the same strategy: We break it down into smaller parts that can be handled and then we can utilize Wikidata to celebrate the sum of all paintings through linked open data!

Scope

All or everything is too broad and has no limit. This limit is to be able to handle the processing of the data – let's not overwhelm ourselves (yet). The scope can always be expanded – in the future we will have the sum of all sculptures, drawings, you get the picture! The scope of this project is notable paintings. A painting is considered notable if one of these options is true:

The painting is in a notable collection of a museum, library, archive (e.g. a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The painting is made by a notable artist (e.g. Van Gogh painting in a private collection)

Tips

Paintings in scope meet notability guidelines in Wikipedia, as they are notable for being in a notable GLAM (Q1030034) collection, are painted by notable painters, and/or generally have secondary reliable source documentation written about them.
GLAM is an acronym and means galleries, libraries, archives and museums, but in a broader sense includes also public buildings like castles, town halls, administrative buildings or religious buildings like churches, cloisters, temples etc. that can hold paintings or wallpaintings and other pieces of art.
Use the guidelines of item structure when adding data to each painting entry. Think of it like a collections management database of information.
If you come across an item (i.e. a painter, medium, collector) that does not exist, please create a new item on Wikidata!

Current overview

To keep an overview of quite a few paintings we created many lists.

Creator overview

Lists created for a creator (a painter) are placed in Category:WikiProject sum of all paintings creators. We created several top creators lists. A selection:

Top creators by number of paintings - Number of paintings by the creator (the most productive painters).
Top creators by number of Wikipedia articles - Number of Wikipedia articles about the creator (the most notable painters).
Top creators by number of Wikipedia painting articles - Number of Wikipedia articles about paintings by the creator (productive and notable).

See the Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Creator for more information.

Collection overview

Lists created for a collection (usually a museum) are placed in a category per country. We created several top collections lists. A selection:

Top collections by number of paintings - Number of paintings in the collection (the biggest collections, also in huge collections category)
Top collections by number of Wikipedia articles - Number of Wikipedia articles about the collection (the most notable collectons).
Top collections by number of Wikipedia painting articles - Number of Wikipedia articles about paintings in the collection (big collection of notable paintings).
Collections by number of illustrated paintings - Number of painting items in the collection with an image.

See the Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Collection for more information.

Genre overview

Lists created for a genre are placed in Category:WikiProject sum of all paintings genres.

Top genres - The most used genres
Portraits - How to handle portrait paintings
Christian religious art - How to handle Christian religious paintings

See the Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Genre for more information.

Main subject overview

Lists created for a main subject are placed in Category:WikiProject sum of all paintings main subjects.

Top main subjects - The overall most used main subjects
Top religious art main subjects - The religious art main most used main subjects
Top portrait main subjects - The religious art main most used main subjects

See the Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Main subject for more information.

Work

Getting the data for all paintings and importing this data and curating the items is a lot of work. To make this manageable we subdivide all paintings in smaller sections by collection (P195). This way people can focus on one collection, get it to a certain standard and then move on to another collection. For this to work every painting needs to have collection (P195).

Here are a few ways you can get started in helping out!

Help bring these lists down to zero

Wikidata already has quite a few paintings. You can help by adding missing information to these paintings.

Here are some other lists you can help with:

Notes: On Wikidata, private collection (Q768717) is a valid collection (P195) and those paintings in private collections should be labelled as such. These will occasionaly have no inventory numbers. You can give it inventory number (P217) with "no value" snak if you are absolutely sure the collection does not use any inventory numbers. Wikimedia commons recognizes "oil on canvas" and "oil on panel" in the artwork "medium" field. On Wikidata, the made from material (P186) should be filled with two items; oil paint (Q296955) and also to canvas (Q12321255) or to "panel". The depicts (P180) can refer to specific buildings if a cityscape, or to people, if a portrait, but it can also be something less specific, such as "forest" or "abstract art". Typical genres are landscape painting (Q191163) or portrait (Q134307).

Items without claims

Add collections that need to be worked on by country

you can browse some collections here Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Collection

We also work on things based by country, which is then broken down into institutions within that country. Please add your institutional data here. Just copy and paste from another page if your page is a red link and modify the markup as needed. See Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Location for the list per country where notes are kept per individual collection.

For more information about collections, see: Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Collection.

Item structure to describe paintings on Wikidata

Paintings should be properly described. See Wikidata:WikiProject Visual arts/Item structure to find a full list of properties. We'll highlight some important ones for paintings here. The two statements every painting here should have:

instance of (P31) → painting (Q3305213) (or one of its subclasses) so we can find the painting
collection (P195) so we can subdivide the work in smaller parts

And to make it a good start painting item add the following statements:

Property	Data type	description	required
creator (P170)	Item	maker of this creative work or other object (where no more specific property exists)	yes
inception (P571)	Point in time	time when an entity begins to exist; for date of official opening use P1619	yes
inventory number (P217)	String	identifier for a physical object or a set of physical objects in a collection	yes
made from material (P186)	Item	material the subject or the object is made of or derived from (do not confuse with P10672 which is used for processes)	yes
location (P276)	Item	location of the object, structure or event. In the case of an administrative entity as containing item use P131. For statistical entities use P8138. In the case of a geographic entity use P706. Use P7153 for locations associated with the object	yes

Questions, issues? Just ask on the talk page (click "Discussion") or send out a tweet with the hashtag #glamwiki.

Add painters (aka creators)

you can browse some creators here Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Creator

To link paintings to their creators, we need to have items about these painters. You can help create missing painters. Good sources for finding painters to create are:

Getty Union List of Artist Names (Union List of Artist Names ID (P245)) - http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/ulan/
RKDartists (RKDartists ID (P650) - https://rkd.nl/en/explore#query=

You can also use Mix'n'Match to match existing items to these authority control databases.

These sources usually contain enough information to build a new item:

Add the name as the label, add variants as aliases.
Set the label with country and occupation
instance of (P31) → human (Q5)
sex or gender (P21) → male (Q6581097) / female (Q6581072) / ...
occupation (P106) → painter (Q1028181) / ...
country of citizenship (P27)
date of birth (P569)
place of birth (P19)
date of death (P570)
place of death (P20)

Add catalogs

How to work on catalogs is described at Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Catalog.

Improve all metadata for the oeuvre of one painter

After importing thousands of paintings, we notice that our data here is not always as clean as it can be. Sometimes creation dates of paintings are missing, attributions are not entirely correct, etc.

One way to help cleaning this up, is by focusing on one single painter's work, checking and improving the correctness and completeness of all their paintings that we already have here on Wikidata.

Here's a list of the 100 painters with the most Wikipedia sitelinks and at least 10 paintings on Wikidata. Pick one and indicate you're working on their oeuvre!

Creators

We want to link every painter with its creator (painter) and improve the quality of the creator items. We create galleries per creator to keep track of them and have an overview of missing creators. The top creators page gives an overview of most important creators based on several different criteria.

To find what items need improvements we have several reports:

Recent incomplete creator: Recently created items that should be expanded
Creator no authority control
Creator no proper authority control
Creator missing collection authority control:

Metadata!

All institutions have metadata of some sort – this data is super important to making the most out of this project. Our dream is that all GLAMs open their collections metadata under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This allows us to easily upload data to Wikidata using automated processes and saves us time and people power to focus on other parts of the project. It also means that those GLAMs who have released that data, like the Rijksmuseum (Q190804), already have their data on Wikidata. You can learn more about why you should open your data CC0 here. Right now, only a small group of institutions have done that.

But my data is published under a CC-BY-SA license! We can't use it through auto mass import because it is incompatible with the license of Wikidata. It's a restrictive license for data and goes against our mission of providing free, reusable data.

For data in databases in the USA we have a similar copyright situation as reproductions of 2D artworks: It's (probably) in the public domain. See the Wikimedia Foundation’s preliminary perspective on the legal issue of database rights. So from a legal standpoint we're probably safe to copy data from a museum in the US, just like we can copy the reproductions of old paintings. Just like with copying reproductions, we'd rather do it together with the GLAM than without their knowledge and consent. See also this overview of cases studies of working together with GLAMs.

We haven't released our metadata, but we do have some of our collections online - Great! Then we can slowly work on manually putting your artwork on Wikidata. Please list it below by country and help us by adding your data manually on Wikidata. It's a long process, but better than not having your work represented.

Participants

The (more than 70) participants of this project are listed at Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Participants

[+] Add yourself to the list

The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:
{{Ping project|sum of all paintings}}

Multichill (talk) 11:28, 8 August 2014 (UTC), focus on the Netherlands[reply]
Husky (talk) 11:38, 8 August 2014 (UTC) - Cool, i'd like to focus on building tools to visualise progress.[reply]
Spinster (talk) 07:00, 9 August 2014 (UTC) Happy to help with manual finetuning that can't be done by bots, and anything else on the 'soft/wet' side of this project. I'm dreaming of complete artists' oeuvres on Wikidata![reply]
Rich Farmbrough (talk) Time to learn2Wikidata
Jheald (talk) 12:33, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Kippelboy (talk) 07:01, 21 August 2014 (UTC) (Focus on Catalan paintings (subdivision of Spain)[reply]
Mushroom (talk) 12:27, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Jane023 (talk) 09:11, 3 October 2014 (UTC) work on Dutch 17th-century paintings and landscapes of Haarlem; Most recently, the sum of all "attributed" paintings by Frans Hals, which is nearly done[reply]
Missvain (talk) 18:51, 18 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Fæ (talk) 13:27, 15 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Zolo (talk) 14:57, 23 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Beat Estermann (talk) 10:33, 3 December 2014 (UTC) (Focus on Swiss heritage institutions)[reply]
Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 15:07, 23 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
KRLS (talk) 11:26, 11 February 2015 (UTC) (Focus on Catalan area museums)[reply]
DivadH (talk) 11:35, 1 March 2015 (UTC) ,happy to help out with any questions in regards to the Europeana API, how to best query it, and/or our metadata[reply]
Xcia0069 (talk) 11:49, 8 March 2015 (UTC), Work on data related to Gianlorenzo Bernini and Artemisia Gentileschi. Work at Europeana too ![reply]
Susannaanas (talk) 07:29, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wittylama (talk) 17:29, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fabrice Florin (talk) 02:35, 26 June 2015 (UTC) I can help in California later this year.[reply]
Vaughn88 (talk) 15:58, 15 July 2015 (UTC) I can help![reply]
Raymond Ellis (talk) 19:31, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hsarrazin (talk) 14:11, 29 August 2015 (UTC) - will give a hand with Creators and AC :)[reply]
louis-garden (talk) 14:21, 31 August 2015 (UTC) for italian paintings (XIIe-XVIIe)[reply]
Olivier (talk) 21:46, 8 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Kopiersperre (talk) 11:33, 20 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 03:49, 23 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Stuart Prior (WMUK) (talk) 11:04, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hannolans (talk) 23:14, 22 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Geraki (talk) 09:52, 24 October 2016 (UTC) (Focus on Greece)[reply]
PatHadley (talk) 12:16, 3 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
MartinPoulter (talk) 14:54, 11 January 2017 (UTC) Working to get data from the University of Oxford (Q34433) and its component institutions shared on Wikidata.[reply]
Pablísima (talk) 18:07, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Carl Ha (talk) 22:10, 9 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Marsupium (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Mauricio V. Genta (talk) 16:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Shani Evenstein (talk) 10:26, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Nasty nas (talk) 07:45, 24 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Bodhisattwa (talk) 14:28, 28 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Joalpe (talk) 18:39, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Fuzheado (talk) 18:33, 30 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Sarasays (talk) 20:00, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thierry Caro (talk) 07:30, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
John Samuel 18:29, 21 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Jklamo (talk) 12:06, 31 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Reosarevok (talk) 10:28, 15 February 2018 (UTC), focus on Estonia[reply]
Ambrosia10 (talk) 19:48, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Subsublibrary (talk) 03:17, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Martingggg (talk) 07:00, 22 February 2018 (UTC), focus on Argentine and Hispanic America[reply]
Kruusamägi (talk) 16:42, 13 March 2018 (UTC), focus on Estonia[reply]
SIryn (talk) 10:36, 9 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Jarekt (talk) 13:49, 7 September 2018 (UTC), focus on moving metadata from Commons to Wikidata[reply]
Walkuraxx (talk) 10:00, 30 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Omotecho (talk) 22:11, 21 January 2019 (UTC), focus on Japan[reply]
GualdimG (talk) 16:19, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Léna (talk) 08:57, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yann (talk) 09:53, 9 June 2019 (UTC) Paul Cézanne (Q35548) for a start...[reply]
Abbe98 (talk) 19:25, 18 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Daniel Mietchen (talk) 15:36, 23 July 2019 (UTC) Have been doing small things here and there — especially improving items around what is depicted on paintings — so might as well sign up.[reply]
Jbandrews (talk) 02:14, 16 October 2019 (UTC) Product Manager at the Art Institute of Chicago.[reply]
Amadalvarez (talk) 06:19, 19 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Meresquared (talk) 14:51, 22 October 2019 (UTC) I'm interested in adding depiction descriptions to paintings, and improving data around women and POC.[reply]
Clifford Anderson (talk) 01:47, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
--Villy Fink Isaksen (talk) 21:14, 17 March 2020 (UTC) focus on danish paintings.[reply]
TemboUngwe (talk) 15:27, 13 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Joan E Beaudoin (talk) 16:36, 31 July 2020 (UTC) Frolicking in metadata about art = heaven on Earth! Currently working on the Uffizi artworks ID file in the Mix'n'Match tool.[reply]
Subodh (talk) 10:26, 6 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Marajozkee (talk) 12:16, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Bhuvana Meenakshi (talk) 11:06, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ham II (talk) 06:03, 17 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Unapeça (talk) 10:47, 15 January 2021 (UTC) Focus on catalan paintings[reply]
Edelseider (talk) 12:55, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wuselig (talk) 10:39, 19 January 2021 (UTC) active in German GLAM-activities[reply]
Tylwyth Eldar (talk) 06:50, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hippokrene (talk) 09:49, 28 August 2021 (UTC)Trying to add property iconclass P1257, general interest in art history[reply]
2le2im-bdc (talk) 20:34, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
VisbyStar (talk) 11:07, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Kamila Neuman (WMPL) (talk) 10:11, 6 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Kim Bach (talk) 20:44, 7 July 2022 (UTC) Focus on paintings from the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst)[reply]
JordanTimothyJames (talk) 05:08, 15 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Jvillafruela (talk) 18:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC) Focus on paintings from the Musée de Grenoble[reply]
María Sacristán (talk) 19:58, 11 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oursana (talk) 21:40, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Riftmaker (talk) 16:00, 19 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Athayahisyam HA (talk) 04:04, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Jcmoissinac HA (talk) 04:04, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Carl Ha (talk) 18:37, 5 September 2024 (UTC)Carl Ha current focus is Russian Museum and the Museum of Artistic Culture Petrograd that was dissolved and integrated into this.[reply]

How this data is being used

Having all this data about paintings available opens up all sorts of creative reuse. Some examples:

http://www.zone47.com/crotos/ - Crotos, a tool to browse works of art on Wikidata
Wikidata Skim - A (very) limited replacement for Wikidata Query, with images
- For example, here are all paintings by Frans Hals
openArtBrowser uses Wikidata to display many works of art
iART is an advanced tool to search images, which uses metadata from Wikidata

To-do list

The todo list of things still to add to this page, feel free to expand!

tools to visualize this progress - I'm working on this Husky (talk) 11:38, 8 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
art finder, I'm in a city, where should I go
release letter
Europeana already CC0
Support / references / endorsements (Rijksmuseum?) and more
tedious by hand -> bots (some source)
CC0 case study
Make intro for Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Find paintings on Wikipedia on this page and link to it
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Provenance
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Automated image uploads
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Link rot
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Made from material
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Movement
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Possible paintings
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Wiki monitor
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/External identifiers
Add Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Needs disambiguation

Reports

Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Catalog - All catalogs
Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Creator - All creators
Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/RKD to match - RKDimages to match with Wikidata
Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Top collections overview - Top collections by different criteria

Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings

Contents

Background

Scope

Tips

Current overview

Creator overview

Collection overview

Genre overview

Main subject overview

Work

Help bring these lists down to zero

Items without claims

Add collections that need to be worked on by country

Item structure to describe paintings on Wikidata

Add painters (aka creators)

Add catalogs

Improve all metadata for the oeuvre of one painter

Creators

Metadata!

Participants

How this data is being used

To-do list

Reports

Navigation

Navigation menu

Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings

Background

Scope

Tips

Current overview

Creator overview

Collection overview

Genre overview

Main subject overview

Work

Help bring these lists down to zero

Items without claims

Add collections that need to be worked on by country

Item structure to describe paintings on Wikidata

Add painters (aka creators)

Add catalogs

Improve all metadata for the oeuvre of one painter

Creators

Metadata!

Participants

How this data is being used

To-do list

Reports

Navigation

Navigation menu

Search