Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Color

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Index · Statistics · Log

Color articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
GA			3	2			5
B	7	17	12	7		1	44
C	7	29	51	71		1	159
Start		37	105	165			307
Stub	1	3	22	155		2	183
List		3	21	11		1	36
Category					104		104
Template					141		141
NA		5	14	47	73		139
Assessed	15	94	228	458	318	5	1,118
Unassessed				1		1	2
Total	15	94	228	459	318	6	1,120
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 3,411			Ω = 4.89

Indian red listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Indian red to be moved to Iron oxide red. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 22:03, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

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Proposed: A custom citation template for Maerz and Paul's A Dictionary of Color

Greetings and felicitations. I've noticed that while Maerz and Paul's A Dictionary of Color is very often cited in color-related articles, the formatting of the citations tends not to follow any standard citation style, as in "Lavender". I propose that we create standard citation template, one that follows Citation Style 1, to make it easier to cite Maerz and Paul, both to use to clean up existing citations and to add new ones.

I recently checked, and a copy of the first edition (mislabeled as the second) has been uploaded to the Internet Archive. Some customization would be needed to link to/cite the appropriate pages and plates, but I think it might be doable.

As a start/example:

{{Cite book |last1=Maerz |first1=A. |last2=Paul |first2=M. Rhea |year=1930 |chapter=Lavender, Lavender Blue, Grey |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofcolo0000aloy/page/162/mode/2up |title=A Dictionary of Color |url=https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofcolo0000aloy/ |url-access=registration |edition=1st |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill Book Company |oclc=251332334}}

which yields:

• Maerz, A.; Paul, M. Rhea (1930). "Lavender, Lavender Blue, Grey". A Dictionary of Color (1st ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. p. 163. OCLC 251332334.

{{Cite encyclopedia}} would be more correct than {{Cite book}}, but I don't know how to link to both the entry and the encyclopedia in {{Cite encyclopedia}}.

Fields that would need to be added:

• page no. with the optional label "(color sample of ___)", including an automatically generated link to the appropriate page in the Internet Archive copy of the book
• "plate [no. ]" (optional)
• "color sample [no.]" (optional)

I will need to find help to add the custom fields and field options, as I am not sufficiently skilled in the necessary markup, but that shouldn't be to difficult (I hope). The template's documentation would also need to be written, to detail the usage of the custom fields/field options. —DocWatson42 (talk) 06:38, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I find these single-source citation templates (for instance {{dlmf}} or {{DNB}}) to be generally a pain to deal with, and significantly prefer just using {{citation}} or {{cite book}} as appropriate for an article [the only issue with that of course being bot-like editors who come try to "helpfully" "upgrade" the citations to use the template]. The problem is that the single-source citation templates typically don't quite match any particular page's style (which citation style to use, whether to spell out author first names or just put initials, etc.), are a dumping ground for every piece of possible metadata anyone can ever find, and are never quite flexible enough.

It's really not a big deal to just copy/paste the duplicate citation metadata from one article to another, in my opinion. –jacobolus (t) 09:19, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: Part of the reason for my proposal is that the current "standard" doesn't follow either CS1 (Citation) or CS2 (Cite book)—it's basically this:

"Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill See color Sample of Lavender—Page 109 Plate 43 Color Sample C5"

copied and pasted across many articles, with the color, page, plate, and color sample numbers changed to fit. Also, unless an article uses Vancouver style, I've never seen an article be particular about whether to spell out author first names or just put initials. —DocWatson42 (talk) 10:11, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

You are welcome to make a template. I just personally have found them to be not that helpful. As one simple example, I think it's a big waste of space to spell out "New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company" when just "McGraw-Hill" is equally unambiguous and helpful to anyone trying to look the book up. I'd use the space on the author names instead, and write something along the lines of:

Maerz, Aloys John; Paul, Morris Rea (1930). "Lavender, Lavender Blue, Grey.". A Dictionary of Color. McGraw-Hill. p. 163, also plate 43, sample C5, pp. 108–109.

It would be even better if if A Dictionary of Color, Aloys John Maerz, and Morris Rea Paul were all blue links. –jacobolus (t) 10:43, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: We aren't limited (much) in space, and while I agree in principle that live wikilinks for the book and its two authors would be good, I do wonder if any of them are noteable. Also, while I am aware of the authors' full names, I rendered them as they appear in the book. —DocWatson42 (talk) 09:35, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

The book is certainly notable enough for an article, and the authors probably too but it would take some effort to track down sources about their lives.

There's no inherently right way to abbreviate authors' names, or publishers, no inherently right choice about which metadata to include, wiki-link, etc. (especially red links), which is my point: conventions on this differ from field to field, journal to journal, and between Wikipedia articles based on the preferences of the authors and local conventions established. That's why I personally dislike these kind of single-source citation templates, because they always adapt poorly to their context.

But as I said, go ahead and make one if you find it helpful. For a template you definitely would want to leave out the red links. –jacobolus (t) 13:12, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

For the number of times that it is cited, it would be helpful, and I will leave out the red links. —DocWatson42 (talk) 03:29, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

According to Kelly & Judd 1955, Munsell renotations for the first 20 pages of Maerz/Paul were measured in: Nickerson (1947) "Interrelation of color specifications", Paper Trade J. 125, 153. But I can't find that source (I didn't look too hard though). Kelly & Judd apparently compared the rest of Maerz/Paul swatches to the Munsell Book of Color to find appropriate Munsell renotations for them, but they unfortunately only print the ISCC–NBS category in the book, not the raw data. If we could find a complete data source, we could make a much better representation of the colors from the book than the currently available scan (which has mediocre color accuracy). –jacobolus (t) 13:30, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Aha, here's Nickerson: https://archive.org/details/sim_paper-trade-journal_1947-11-06_125_19/page/224/mode/1up –jacobolus (t) 13:36, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello, Please note that Color calibration, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 16 October 2023 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

color article input requests

Looking for some input for the following color articles:

• Talk:Color_theory#This_article_needs_direction
• Talk:Standard_illuminant#Merge_proposal

Curran919 (talk) 14:05, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

A request for efforts on Wikisource..

Anyone able to help get: s:Index:NBS Circular 553.djvu Transcribed? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 00:55, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

To be honest I don't really see the point. Anyone curious can just look at the scan. It can even be OCR'd. If you wanted to make this useful for modern times, you could try to put all of the color names into a database of some kind, but Wikisource isn't capable of hosting something like that. –jacobolus (t) 01:31, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Ideally, the transcription should ultimately also be into Wikidata, assuming someone is able to convert the color references into RGB triplets or xyY values. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 09:11, 18 February 2024 (UTC)