Thinkin' Wiki edit
Reflections - 11/5/2010 edit
As I sit here on the fifth of November, remembering gunpowder, treason, and plot and thinking about the IUPUI Public Art Collection, the first thing that comes to mind is that I had no idea there was so much of it out there on campus. I only have one class out there and it essentially involves walking from a parking garage into a building through a skywalk. I'm almost never actually walking around campus outside, so most of the art documented is unfamiliar to me. It's a far cry from Purdue, where I spent so many years; Purdue is not what you'd call an "art-heavy" campus. There's some around, but, unless I'm just completely oblivious, not nearly as much as IUPUI has. There's a fountain with four roaring lion heads out of which water shoots during the warm months. There's another fountain that's pretty to look at but poorly maintained. The other two campus fountains are more installations than art (which I say knowing a piece can be both). They feel more like architectural features than intentionally designed art.
Other than that, there's a smattering of poorly maintained bronzes here and there, or not there, as is the case with the one that was stolen a few years back and never replaced or repaired. I used to belong to a martial arts dojo and we trained on the lawn where that particular bronze was, and it was falling apart before it ever got stolen. We used to spin it around on its pedestal and lift it up and down, which was problematic because it was supposed to be stable and unmoving.
There are plenty of busts of personages of historical Purdue-related significance, and they're public, for the most part, but they're not outside. They lack the variety of the collection at IUPUI.
I guess what I'm saying is that the IUPUI Public Art Collection puts Purdue to shame. At the same time, though, it occurs to me that the fine arts and art history students at Purdue might want to document what they have. Perhaps that's a pursuit for a later date.
As far as the Wikipedia articles about the Collection are concerned, the primary things I noticed were structural regularity and variations in length quality from article to article. The regular structure is a nice thing to have as it gives us a nice template from which to work when putting our research into words. The variation is to be expected and I assume it's a function of each individual's dedication to the project and personal writing ability, how much information each person was able to turn up, and how much attention the article has garnered here on Wikipedia. I checked the History sections of a couple of the articles and the vast majority of edits were made by the original author. Some of the articles with a clunkier style could use a bit of streamlining by someone with a copy of Strunk and White, but I figure they haven't been noticed yet by the types of Wikipedians who do that sort of thing.
I might end up doing that sort of thing myself, to a limited extent. I'm kind of a style junkie, and when text just doesn't flow correctly, I'm always mentally rewriting it anyway.
Reflections - 11/15/2010 edit
The article I chose to edit was the one on Purdue's Engineering Fountain, the large fountain in the center of the University's Engineering Mall. Lafayette/West Lafayette isn't my hometown, but I've spent most of my years in Indiana there, so it's the closest to my heart just at the moment.
When I got to it, it was in need of a fairly hefty overhaul, so I got the process started. It was woefully misorganized; much of the information under the headers was more appropriate under other headers, so I moved quite a bit around. I added a lead for the article, which it completely lacked. I changed some of the wording to make it flow better. I added a reference for the cost of the fountain, noted a place that needed a citation (though, truth be know, there were more; I noted that on the talk page), and I added an external link to the Purdue University Visual Arts Committee, which has a catalog of the art on campus.
Looking through that catalog, it struck me that, contra my above reflections from last week, there are definitely more works of art on campus than I remember. Some of the 2D art in the various buildings struck a chord in my head, as I have walked by it before and simply forgotten about it. Much of the sculpture listed on the site is completely foreign to me. I lived in Lafayette for eight years and spent five and a half of them attending Purdue, walking all over campus for classes and club meetings and just for fun, and somehow those sculptures slipped under my nose entirely. I feel like a Philistine now, and it occurs to me that I would likely have completely ignored the art at IUPUI and around the city (with the exception of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument; you can't really ignore that) unless I had taken this class and immersed myself in this project. Then again, I've never claimed to be an art guy.
Back to the article. Its assessed quality is Start-Class, and it shows. Part of the problem is the lack of resources. There are plenty of resources that give a cursory overview of the Engineering Fountain and its history, but nothing that I could find online that gives nearly enough information to bring the article up to the level of Cloud Gate (which, if you haven't seen it in person, you really ought to; it's pretty amazing). My description of the changes I made to the article should give a pretty good sense of how the clearly the headings were laid out: quite poorly. The headings all made sense as headings, but the information under them seemed to have no useful organizational structure, and certainly not that of the headings. Background info was contained in the "Description" section; visual description was contained in the "Background" and "General Information" sections. I reshuffled it to place information under the relevant headings, and I think even just that little bit of work helped the article out a lot. Adding a lead didn't hurt, either.
On a scale from 1 to 10, I'd say that I trust the article at a 7. Most of the descriptive information is evident when one looks at the fountain (and I have, on many occasions) and I verified the historical details by checking the cited references and finding a new one. The "General Information" section is full of uncited information, however, and I think it mildly violated NPOV. As I noted on the talk page, I know that a lot of what's under that heading is "common knowledge" among Purdue students, but that's not going to fly on Wikipedia. Large parts of it read like it was written by a disgruntled undergrad who was angry that they added a steel sheath to the water jet and took away his full-bore fountain runs. In the spirit of inclusionism, however, I simply marked it as "citation needed" and noted it on the talk page. Surely there's an article in a back issue of The Exponent somewhere addressing the addition of the metal cylinder and students' feelings about it. I'm looking for it right now, actually, but their website isn't the most cooperative of things.
Damn, but this stuff gets addicting.
Reflections - 11/29/2010 edit
As things stand now, I'm reasonably certain my articles are more or less complete. I don't think I'll be able to squeeze out any more information about either Spirit of Indiana or Henry F. Schricker Bust. I'm definitely proud of a lot what I managed to dig up, though. Richard made it my special assignment to find out why Governor Schricker is embedded onto a large lump of something ("a giant tumor," as he put it) and thanks to the microfiche at the State Library, I was able to triumphantly e-mail him the answer: it's a rock, not a tumor, and Rubins included it "to establish the great strength of the man." I really didn't think I'd be able to answer that question. Thank God for old newspapers.
And speaking of newspapers, I'd never actually used microfiche or microfilm before. I'd only ever seen it used in movies and on TV, and getting to use it myself was a strange and wonderful experience. It made me feel like a serious researcher for the first time in my life. Perhaps it's a sign of how much I live in media that it also made me feel like a cop in an old movie looking for the one piece of information that would confirm his suspicions that the bad guy's alibi was bunk.
One thing I discovered over the course of the project is how accommodating librarians can be. Some of our resource tsars had negative things to say about the cooperativeness of their particular contacts, but it seems like the libraries are a shining beacon of hope for scholarship. Every librarian I've dealt with over the course of this project has been patient and insanely ready to help out. The librarian who helped me out with the vertical files at the public library was good enough to print me a listing of newspaper articles that featured David Rubins and then comp my print costs as long as I printed two copies of each for the files. There was only one article on Rubins in there when I showed up, and now there are five.
Wikipedians have also been very accommodating. The few times I had done something untoward, a clear and reasonable note would show up on my talk page explaining what I had done and how to fix it. It was not difficult at all to learn the skills I needed to write my articles, though it still seems daunting to truly dive into Wikipedia.
Overall, the entire research process went far more smoothly than I would have expected. Perhaps I had easy pieces, as lots of information was readily available, but I was quite pleased with the process. I got to take some raw data, more or less, and synthesize it into something that might be useful for someone.