Commons:WikiProject Postcards

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Shortcut: COM:WPPC

You like postcards, then this WikiProject is for you!

WikiProject Postcards koordinuje údržbu a zlepšování Category:Postcards, včetně souborů a kategorií v ní. Pohlednic jsou velmi dobrým zdrojem pro Wikimedia Commons. Zobrazují minulost a jsou užitečné pro vizuální podporu mnoha článků na Wikipedii. Projekt přidání pohlednicových obrázků na Wikimedia Commons se mohl ukázat jako vynikající způsob pro vytvoření největší sbírky pohlednic v historii Filokartie. V tuto chvíli zde máme přes 300 000 pohlednic. Společně můžeme budovat a organizovat tento obrovský archiv. Pokud máte rádi pohlednice, přidejte se k nám a pomozte vybudovat tento archiv. Tato stránka se snaží nastavit standardy pro každodenní práci.

Pro rychlý začátek:

License

Copyright and Postcards

Postcards are not free of copyright. Sometimes the holder of the copyright (the creator or the publisher of a postcard) sets this under a free license (for example Category:Brück & Sohn or Category:Curt Teich). The license they should use are:

Very old postcards

Is the postcard old enough (>120 years) you can digitize it and upload under a free license:

Digitize and Upload

Best practice

  • Use a scanner or a camera to digitize your postcards.
  • Use TIF-format, because it has no compression artifacts. JPG-format is the second best choise. Experts upload TIFs (see example).
  • Digitize both sides, because some times many pieces of information are on the rear side (adress-space) of the postcard (title, publisher, date, etc). Use scanners with Duplex automatic document feeder (DADF, without bending the original)
  • Use highest DPI as possible. 600 dpi is a good choice. You never know what other users will do with the image you will upload. In the future they might become Wallpapers, for example.

Examples for scan resolution


Examples for both sides


Upload

  • For uploads of few postcards you can use the page Commons:Upload. This is the default way.
  • If you want to upload many more postcards, then you should test Commons:Pattypan. This tool scans a folder at your computer and generates a table, which will be saved in a spreadsheet-file. Afterwards, and offline, you could fill out this table with all metadata, using your office tools (Libre Office, MS Excel, ...). When this work is completed, Pattypan can be used to load the table and upload all images from your folder together with their metadata. For example all 590 images of the Category:Postcards by Erwin Spindler were uploaded this way.
  • If you want to upload a huge number of postcards, the tool Commons:VicuñaUploader is very good. For example over 30.000 images of the Category:Postcards published by Brück & Sohn were uploaded in this way. Normally, you should start the program and generate a session and upload the files, edit the metadata, and upload the whole work. But you can also save your session as a XML-File. This XML-File can be used as API for a big upload. Maybe you store all data of our postcards in a database you can generate an XML-file in this Vicuña-format and upload so a huge number of postcards in Commons.

For more information see Commons:WikiProject Postcards/Upload.

Metadata

Categories

Every postcard should have at least one category of the subcategories of the Category:Postcards. If you find an postcard-image in Commons which does not include any of these Postcard-Categories, please categorize it. It will be very useful to set as a minimum:

Needed Type Examples Notice Image
Minimum location
 
Paris, Category:Postcards of Paris
Minimum subject
 
Steam locomotive on bridge, Category:Postcards of steam locomotives in the United States,
Category:Postcards of bridges in Iowa
Optimal Publisher
  • see also Category:Postcard publishers (only publishers)
  • see also Category:Postcards by publisher (only postcards)
  • Syntax typical "Postcard published by ..."
  • Set serial number in category [[Category:Postcards published by ...|#:::::45231]], so all postcards sort by serial number.
  • Every Publisher should have two categories!
    • First: [[Category:Name_of_publisher]] and
    • second: [[Category:Postcards published by Name_of_publisher]]

 
Publisher is printed on image (serial number 23509), Category:Postcards published by Dr. Trenkler & Co.‎
Optimal author
 
Signature Erw. Spindler (left down), Category:Postcards by Erwin Spindler
Optimal Year / Decades
  • see also Category:Postcards by date
  • Syntax typical: #### postcards (year)
  • Syntax typical: ####s postcards (decade)
  • Syntax typical: ##st-century postcards (century‎)
 
Date of writing 1903-11-30, Category:1903 postcards
Optimal numbers of images Category:Postcards with 5 images
 
Category:Postcards with 11 images
Optimal page format
  • see also Category:Postcards by page orientation
  • easy to set for rectangle format
  • maybe later can a bot set this category
  • later we get categories for different forms (shaped, round, hexagon, octagon)
 
portrait orientation‎, Category:Postcards with portrait orientation
Optimal material
 
Wood, Category:Wooden postcards
Optimal special function
 
Gramophone-Postcard, Category:Phono postcards
Optimal print technology
 
chromolithography

Coordinates and maps

Annotations

 
This image has a few notes, which you should be able to see here on this thumbnail if version 2 of ImageAnnotator is enabled.

With the Gadget ImageAnnotator we can add notices to an image in Commons. This is very useful. First we can describe better what we see. Look at this postcard with over 10 annotations. Or we can add a notice for what we can read but we don't know the right category. Look at this image with the notice "Die Haubenlerche". If you search in commons for this text everybody will find this image.


Serial number

Most postcard-publishers print a serial number on the front or rear side of their postcards. It is an easy way to order the specific postcard by using this number.

Best practice

We could use this number in every image of its category in the following way, so that images are sorted by their serial numbers:
[[Category:Postcards published by Stengel & Co.|#:::::45231]]
We can, thus, easily check for double-numbered postcards or missing ones. Attention; if it is a 5 digit serial number we need five time ":".
For example see in: Category:Postcards published by Stengel & Co.

Second best

The second best choice is to write this serial number in the first part of the filename like in:
Example see in: Category:Images from Brück & Sohn

Wikidata

Items

Queries

Requests

Project infos

Project participants

The project was founded by Stefan Kühn on March 10, 2020. Everyone is welcome to participate. Just sign up here in the list of participants.

Statistics

Result from PetScan:

Date Files in Category:Postcards
and subcategories (Depth 20)
Request #1
Files in Category:Address sides of postcards
and subcategories (Depth 20)
Request #2
All Postcards
= #1 - #2
Comment
2004-09-30: - - >100 After start of Wikimedia Commons
2016-10-30: - - >50.000 Finish of upload >30.000 postcards from Brück & Sohn
2020-01-16: 230.624 8.390 222.234 First statistic with Petscan
2020-02-10: 231.788 8.392 223.396
2020-03-10: 232.432 8.393 224.039
2020-04-10: 233.712 9.451 224.261
2020-05-13: 240.963 9.868 231.095
2020-06-10: 242.909 9.889 233.020
2020-07-11: 243.831 9.907 233.924
2020-08-11: 245.422 9.933 235.489
2020-09-16: 248.477 9.964 238.513
2020-12-16: 264.790 10.324 254.466
2021-01-11: 269.149 10.338 258.811
2021-02-16: 272.729 10.350 262.379
2021-03-18: 274.699 10.367 264.332
2021-04-13: 282.280 10.389 271.891
2021-11-17: 296.669 10.888 285.781
2021-12-22: 301.043 11.006 290.037
2022-03-03: 317.257 12.477 304.780
2022-07-02: 329.438 12.831 316.604
2022-10-06: 338.416 13.530 324.886
2023-01-29: 350.064 13.938 336.126
2023-05-17: 364.324 14.316 350.008
2023-09-28: 372.807 14.739 358.068
2024-03-19: 383.778 15.324 368.454



Quality management

Improvement of Categories

Search postcards by filetype

Search postcards by keywords

Search for special words (more languages see Wikidata) and add postcard-categories

Search postcards in source


Search for page orientation


Structured data

Basic infos

Properties for postcards

Search in structured data


Add structured data to postcards

One of the best help for this project is to add structure data to the postcards. Here you find many to do:

To do list

You can help!

  • Insert in all postcards good categories.
  • Insert in all postcards Structured data (SDC), like Depicts. So we can use this for future sorting and processing scripts.

Current work (in progress)

Logos of publishers

Recent postcard uploads

Postcard printing techniques

Serial number

Postmarks

Stamps

At the moment we have:

Did we need a category for Stamps on postcards (only)?

  • Category:Stamps on postcards
  • Maybe this can help by the temporal classification.
    • If the stamp is from 1930 then the postcard was sent in 1930 or later.