I think detailed coverage of stamps, coins, bills, &c is well within the scope of Wikipedia; to the extent of eventually having one article per item for items that look significantly different from one another. Although the list of misprints or misstrikes for a given stamp/coin should be listed uner a single aticle.

Certain articles lend themselves to philatelic coverage, for example, Stellaland, after all, most folks who have ever heard of Stellaland first encountered it with respect to its stamps. Illustrations of a few representative stamps could be added. A complete stamp catalog might be going a bit far, but if the energy is around, which I doubt, it could be a sister project, Wikistamps...

If you take a photograph or scan a postage stamp that image is not copyrighted even though the underlying design may be. Sometimes a nice image, for example of a butterfly or bird or even a person can be included in Wikipedia in that way. The Japanese stamp you reference is just a photograph or scan of a stamp which anyone can make and publish, although perhaps, in Japan, there might be some restriction as it is a Japanese stamp. It occurs to me that there is a sort of disconnect here. If you take a photograph of painting in an museum or someone's home that is copyright free but if you scan a reproduction of a painting in a book it is not, yet there is very little difference in what you have done.

Fred

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 07:49:48 -0600 Fred Bauder wrote: Anyone _can_ make and publish it. But that does not mean that it's legal. Making a photograph of something and copying that photograph is a way of copying, and disallowed just like all other methods of copying copyrighted works.

Indeed, there's little difference, and your statement is wrong.

Yann Forget wrote: Don't tease me! :-) I have a database currently describing 146,336 types to varying degrees of detail, all personally typed in by me and copyright-clean, made possible by some special C software that handles defaults and integrity checking. This is about half of all types in existence. I use it to track my collection, which is an unknown size above 68,557 types, since many are in the "other half" not yet entered - WP editing has severely cut into my stamp db time. :-( The software also lets me do things like download into a Palm, so it's handy when I'm out shopping. Certainly I've thought about how to publish this database, and have steered clear of the various obstacles (no use of existing catalog numbers for instance) in expectation of being able to make it available some day. A wiki project could be a great way to finish filling it out, and I even brought it up a while back as something that needs a database-editing mode. There are some technical problems to solve; for instance, I don't want to upload data about my personal collection, but if people add to the type data, I want to be able to download it and merge in - but what if some idiot deleted the record describing one of my stamps? I've also started separating the English-language bits from the generic data, in the hope of making it multi-lingual. I'm of two minds about whether it's "encyclopedia data" - certainly there are "encyclopedias of postage stamps", with coverage ranging from one paragraph to multiple pages per stamp. (When you get into designers, the politics, the varieties, etc, it adds up.) On the other hand, I've been seeding WP with overview-type philatelic accounts for various countries, about two dozen articles so far, plus a pile of illustrations, but they haven't generated much interest - glaring typos have sat in some of them for months. So it doesn't feel like there's a groundswell of demand for something even lengthier and more detailed. But if people like, I could create a meta page with more info about my existing data and how it might be usefully wikified, and we can continue thinking about it there.

Stan