User:Mdd

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This user has been on Commons for  17 years, 5 months, and 28 days.
This user has uploaded 7.816 images to Wikimedia Commons.
185,347+This user has made over 185,347 contributions to Commons.
This user believes in assuming good faith and civility.
This user respects copyright, but sometimes it can be a major pain.


Marcel Douwe Dekker (Mdd) (Delft 1964), Dutch systems engineer and conceptual artist participating in Wikipedia, Wikicommons, Wikiquote and Wiktionary, who started at the Dutch Wikipedia in September 2004.

Life and work, contributions to Wikipedia, and more specifically to Commons

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After studying mechanical engineering, business administration and art I started in the early 1990s as artist and designer developing concepts across the fields of art, science, design and organization. This began with basic intuitive fascination for such things as expression, life, creation and destruction, and turned into investigating the process of systematization and visualization and the creation of a systematic world view.

The contributions I make to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are part of my research & development as independent artist, in which I try to improve the representation on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons at the same time. I have uploaded over 7.500 images here to Wikimedia, some scanned from books, others moved from Wikipedia project. Most of these image have been copy/pasted from older or new online source after extensive search, which I call image scouting. For a significant part this concerns historical images almost lost and found, explicitly meant to for the transfer of cultural heritage to a global audience, and not for commercial exploration by third parties. Also, I contribute to the Commons organization through categorization. I started in 2008 when I significantly contributed to the creation of categories for all diagrams with over 10.000 edits. This is part of the 250.000 contributions in total I made to several Wikipedia projects over the years. Over the years I started and developed a series of galleries at commons, which are intended to give an overview both thematically and historically of the particular subjects. This can be helpful to structure the representation of those subjects in corresponding Wikipedia articles.

Due to a lack of illustrations in particular fields of the formal sciences, I have been creating a series of illustrations. In between I have done some documentary and portrait photography for Wikipedia. More recent in 2018 I have been donating some of my earlier photography from the pre-internet era (and have been writing corresponding Wikipedia articles). In recent years, focusing on the Netherlands, Wikimedia Commons has been granted a large donation of black and white images from social, political and cultural events. I think there are still large gabs of more recent pre-internet events. It would be great if we together continue to make Wikimedia Commons a place to represent this era, and collect images of notable events.

Most of my earlier photography is about people and events in the world of art and design in the 1990s. Hereby a smaller part is the upload of some of my work as a professional artist, which serves a dual purpose. I have been creating art and design for a period of just ten years from 1991 tot 2001 in practically all fields of visual art, hereby cooperation with a significant number of artists and designers. As a start a little over 100 artists, designers and scientists have been represented, which has continued to expand working along this bottom up approach. The presentation of a number of my own works gives both an introduction to this work, and serves as experiment to classify and present works of art and design in a coherent and representative way. In my later conceptual enterprises this is one of the main topics of research, coherent global representation. That has been the reason why I had started organizing the Wiki Commons category structure on diagrams in the first place.

Over the years in the background I worked on several overlapping smaller and larger categorization projects on what I could call next generation categorization, creating over 5.000 categories on Commons. As mentioned in 2008 I started categorizing all types of diagrams. In 2011-'12 I started with sculptors and ceramists from the Netherlands, and continued with social structures in the Dutch art world around main actors as art school, movements, prizes and galleries. More recent themes have been differentiated in historical frameworks, such as the posters of the Netherlands. By the end of 2021 there was the public domain donation of the Noord-Hollands Archief of the Beeldbank De Boer collection with about 2 million images of the Haarlem region. For some months I focused on this collection, and the import and categorization of three decades of images of the municipalities in that region.

Commons contributions : Galleries

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Visualization
Main Chart, Diagram, Map and Technical drawing
Management, economics and other societal modelling
Main Economic diagram, Management diagram
Systems and software engineering
Technology and technical visualisation
Cognitive science
Designers
Specific types of economic activy and organisation
Specific (individual) forms of concept development (latest experiments)

Next generation categorization

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Most of 80+ galleries listed were created around 2008-2011 and in general almost never expended by third parties. Also almost all 1.000+ thematically and biographical galleries encountered were (severely) underdeveloped and/or not kept up to date. A wild guess would be that these galleries in general contain less then 1% of the images in the comparing category.

On the other had and understanding is growing that (at least) two types of categorization doctrines exist: Categorization for archiving and categorization for documentation. Both are complementary and serve there own purpose... - to be continued - .

Categorization for documentation practices, in general
Categorization for documentation practices, specific series thematical
Categorization for documentation practices, specific series geographical and/or historical
Categorization for documentation practices, specific sites

Next generation categorization documentation

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The first wave of Categorization for archiving brought the documentation by infobox(es). Introduction of the general infobox (with data from Wikidata) didn't come with the general understanding of removing some existing small infoboxes. This doubled, tripled or quadrupled the number of infoboxes... - to be continued -

Next generation categorization goals ===
  • Participation oriented
  • Next generation cooperation
  • Developing algorithms for semi automatic documentation generation
Next generation categorization implementation
  • Automatic chronological order of images in categories
  • Facilitating wikilinks automatically to existing galleries
  • Auditing and re-evaluation stategy meet and greet
  • Developing algorithms for semi automatic gallery generation
  • User questionaries

Commons contributions : Images

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Software and enterprise engineering illustrations (dating back from 2008)

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Philosophy of science illustration (dating back from 2008)

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Portrait and documentary pictures (dating back from 2008)

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Commons contributions : Categories, selection

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Overview

In the listing below there is short selection of the categories I created on Wikimedia Commons for documentation and information retrieval purposes. The first category I created was the Category:Systems biology on 14 May 2007. In those early years I focused on the interdisciplinary field of systems theory and the fields of visualization. It was the challenge to divide categories in such a coherent way, that the whole scope of science and visualization was covered in such a way that information retrieval is optimized. In those early years a global categorization bone structure was developed, which most of it has lasted so far and I guess has prove its usefulness.

Listing (Old listing dating back from 2008)
Science

Scientific books

Scientists categories

Systems theory

Systems theory categories

Systems engineering Categories

Software engineering

General categories

Specific software engineering diagram categories

Visualization

General categories

Specific categories

Visualization history

Categories

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Further contrbutions in the field of categorization

Over the years by times I have kept contributing to Commons uploading images, and creating the accompanying Wikimedia Commons categories to store those images in the process. By autumn 2021 I have created over 3.000 categories, and multiple other category bone structures. In a way these categories map more specific fields of science and society. I believe this to be a never ending story to satisfy the growing need to keep Wikimedia Commons a nice place to look around.

See also

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This user has an account on Flickr.