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Marcel Douwe Dekker (Mdd) (Delft 1964), Dutch systems engineer and conceptual artist participating inWikipedia, Wikicommons,Wikiquote andWiktionary, who started at theDutch Wikipedia in September 2004.
After studyingmechanical engineering,business administration andart I started in the early 1990s as artist and designer developing concepts across the fields of art,science,design andorganization. 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 myresearch & development as independent artist, in which I try to improve the representation onWikipedia andWikimedia 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 callimage 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 theformal sciences, I have been creating a series of illustrations. In between I have done somedocumentary andportrait 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 ofart anddesign in the1990s. 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 callnext 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 theBeeldbank 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.
More recently next generation categorization research & development has been focused on categorization and presentation to establish more effective and effective services for the global audience. As such some pilot projects have been undertaken to establish less selective more representative global representation. In short, search results and categories should offer the audience a global overview of the images available on the specific topic.
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 andcategorization for documentation. Both are complementary and serve there own purpose...- to be continued -.
The first wave ofCategorization for archiving brought thedocumentation 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 -
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 theCategory:Systems biology on 14 May 2007. In those early years I focused on the interdisciplinary field ofsystems theory and the fields ofvisualization. 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.
Scientific books
Scientists categories
Systems theory categories
Systems engineering Categories
General categories
Specific software engineering diagram categories
General categories
Specific categories
Categories
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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.
 | This user hasan account onFlickr. |
