Etu

Wikiphilately

Et tu, Etu? ;)

Your stamp catalogue idea is very interesting. That is, however, a huge undertaking. I do not think we could set up a coherent catalogue numbering system due simply to the nature of wikis -- anyone could come in at any time and change my numbering scheme, so that any numerical reference could become obsolete at any time. (It's bad enough with Scott et al. reordering numbers every couple of years...) However, we could have cross-references to all the standard catalogues. It could be quite useful to have a wiki where I could search for France, Yvert number what-have-you, and find out what Scott and Minkus call the stamp. As far as images go, we are safe in the U.S. with stamps before 1923, as regarless of original copyright status they are now in the public domain. I think the E.U. situation is similar.

So long as we do not order the catalogue by any one company's scheme, we can cite the various catalogue numbers without violating copyright -- people routinely cite them all the time in publications (indeed, that's the purpose of having the numbers, no?). I'm not sure how to key the wiki catalogue, though...

(See also my comments at User_talk:Stan_Shebs.) —Tkinias 02:08, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have been developing some ideas already some years - nothing concrete though. You could identify a stamp pretty generally as a definitive/series/value and commemorative/year/serie/order# (and dozens of exceptions). The thing what you may be missing is the feeling how many stamps there are "in between" two stamps; something that is quite easy to estimate with sequential numbering. However, if we have a computer database, it is easy to calculate something like this. Actually, the interesting possibility of this kind of database is that it is possible to automatically generate album pages based on your preferences. In fact, I once made a prototype on this kind of system and it worked well (but it was very elementary compared what it could be). --Etu 02:29, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The problems I anticipate with numbering are twofold: First, endless revert-wars over whether a given colour variety (for example) is a distinct stamp or not -- is this #212A, #212a, #213, or too insignificant to catalogue? Second, there are designs which are used over very long periods of time, and cataloguers differ as to whether they constitute one long series (thus numbered in one block) or several related series (thus numbered in several disjoint blocks). It occurs to me, though, that a novel approach would be assigning a number on a strictly chronological basis without any attempt to keep series together (since the wiki software can group issues by series or by any other criteria we want). This would give us something like France 1898.01.20.0.05 for a hypothetical 5 centime issue of 20 January 1898. This wouldn't help arguments about varieties, though... —Tkinias 02:45, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It just so happens that I have something like this already, and have solved many of the problems that WPID and others ran into. Part of my strategy has been to avoid numbering entirely, although it will probably have to be introduced in some form to deal with merges of input from multiple people. Check out meta:Wikistamp for my proposal (and note the lack of reaction since I posted it three months ago, ahem.) Stan 05:19, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)