Patlichty

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Hello, Patlichty, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! DanielRigal (talk) 00:16, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Art and related

Hi Patlichty. I want to reply to a few points you made on the Wikipedia Art AFD. They are not directly relevant to the deletion discussion and they were (probably correctly) removed from that:

• I take your point about Dali and the Surrealists being bad boys. I am pretty sure that Dali would have made a very bad Wikipedian but I also think that he would have recognised it as an inappropriate venue for his genius. I still think that disrupting Wikipedia, even for artistic purposes, is not something that a responsible academic should encourage. I find the notion that serious curators are taking this whole thing seriously to be absolutely staggering but that is up to them. What we can't do is bend the entire nature of Wikipedia to accommodate them.

• I fail to see how disrupting (I am trying to avoid saying "vandalising") Wikipedia is conceptual art. I am not sure what the concept is supposed to be. Please take a little time to consider what Wikipedia is. It isn't just a playground where people can write whatever they like for promotion, for fun, or even for art. It is a serious encyclopaedia which aims to bring the knowledge of the world to the whole world, including to people who have no access to any other sort of encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is a charitable organisation working for a very worthy cause. Almost all of the work is done by volunteers. Disrupting Wikipedia's work as an encyclopaedia is no more a legitimate an artwork than vandalising a truck taking aid to the third world.

• They really should host this sort of thing themselves in future. They can be as transgressive as they like on their own Wiki. They can have control over it and have confidence that it won't be deleted. The software is free and anybody can set one up. Nobody is trying to destroy what they have written. We just need to moved somewhere more appropriate.

• As regards the other articles I tagged, I am amazed that this has caused so much complaint. Tagging articles is the standard Wikipedia method of indicating what needs to be improved in them. Given that the people themselves have been editing their articles themselves (against strong recommendation in Wikipedia policy) it is perfectly fair and reasonable that they get given a look over for appropriateness and objectivity. Even if they are notable artists (which seems borderline to me), it doesn't mean that there may not be problems with their Wikipedia articles that need to be tagged.

The fact that you feel strongly enough about the tags to mention them indicates that you do understand that Wikipedia is important enough to care about. Please be responsible. Please don't encourage people to mess it up.

--DanielRigal (talk) 00:32, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Art and media restoration?

Hi, I noticed the deletion discussion toward the end of its lifespan. You're a professor of art so this might be of interest to you. A group of editors have been restoring historic images and audio files from the public domain for encyclopedic use.

• Encyclopedic image restoration
• 
  Scan from a seventeenth century sketchbook of military designs.
• 
  After restoration, illustrates the camera obscura article.

Not exactly art for art's sake, but quite useful. Our goals are to persuade more museums and archives to digitize their collections in high quality files, and to mobilize a network of active restorationists. If we had 100 people each doing 2 restorations a week, Wikipedia could gain 10,000 featured pictures in one year. And since Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 language versions this material would have global application.

Let's talk about your interests and focus; there may be some synergies here. Best regards, Durova^Charge! 07:19, 15 February 2009 (UTC)