🛠️ wikisculpture

A wiki for sculptures - all the sculptures!

(not yet, of course, but we'll get there...)

Check it out at https://www.wikisculpture.com and https://sculpture.dittwald.com

The site is open-source ( https://github.com/sculpture/site) and so is the data ( https://github.com/sculpture/data)

History

As far as I can remember, my parents have liked to go on walks. When we were new to Canada, and Toronto in particular, my parent's would frequently go on walks ... and take pictures of sculptures.

In the age of Geocities (during the early years of the internet), my Dad created a website to display their sculpture photos (and the artist, title, year and location) – all hand crafted HTML.

Around this time, my mother participated in a private-college web development course, but it wasn't to her liking. But, it was very to my liking (and in retrospect, to my great fortune). I devoured her leftover textbooks (I remember reading HTML4 on a boat cruise around the Thousand Islands; and there were other books on Javascript, Flash and PHP).

As a result, I made some terrible game and websites in Flash and Javascript. ...but, eventually, I realized that my dad's manual toil over updating the sculpture website was unnecessary - he could just use a database and I could generate the pages with PHP.

...and so the first version of WikiSculpture - then just "Dittwald Toronto Sculpture Photo Gallery" - was born. (~2003)

I don't recall much of that version, other than it being PHP, MySQL, and hosted on Site5. My dad had a non-denormalized database in MS Access, from which he would export a TSV file, which he would then upload through some convoluted PHPMyAdmin process.

We would occasionally get emails from the public, or from artists themselves. We had a fun lunch with Anne Harris, where she dropped some hot goss on the goings on of the Toronto sculptors community back in the day.

Every once in a while, someone licenses a photo - usually for a book, but recently for a plaque:

At one point, my mom visited the City of Toronto archives to try and get some information on some sculptures - the archivist couldn't find it, but they recommended that my mom check out this "great site"... which turned out to be our site of course!

~2005, a friend in high school, who was into web design and Photoshop made a new design for the site, and I restyled it.

Also around 2005, I came across Ruby on Rails, and started to build various apps in it. Eventually, in ~2009, while in University, I began to to rebuild the sculpture site with Rails - with a properly denormalized database and UI to manage the data.

(I remember working on the Rails rewrite on the Saturday that started reading week of second year. I spent a few hours manually transforming the denormalized database into a normalized one that fit the way Rails wanted things... only to accidentally drop the wrong database and lose several hours of work. The stress of that moment instantly triggered a terrible migraine, coupled with some later bad decisions, ended up partially blinding me for the rest of the year. It took several years before I touched the project again.)

In early 2017, empowered by several years of professional projects in Clojure, (and a growing backlog of sculpture photos) I returned to the sculpture project and started to rewrite the site in Clojure. The UI was heavily inspired by Google Maps (which I now itch to change). The new admin interface made it much easier to upload and edit sculptures, enabling my dad to keep adding ...and adding ...and adding.

As of 2025-09-12, the latest incarnation is at https://wikisculpture.com with over 5000 photos of over 3700 sculptures (all by my dad).

There's also https://sculpture.dittwald.com/ which is a recreation of the 2005 site, pulling data from the WikiSculpture API. The goal is for this site to be "my family's photos", while WikiSculpture proper grows to attract contributions from anyone.

WikiSculpture is another one of those projects that I've been poking at for a long time and will likely keep it going forever. It has been my guinea pig for learning and applying new programming concepts - with many, many rewrites - and that will likely continue (although, I hope it will be more stable going forward - I plan to stick with Clojure indefinitely, and I'm quite happy with the latest backend.)

Plans

• smooth out the editing process and open it up to anyone
  • ...maybe a "points" system to reward for contributions (although my dad would likely remain the reigning champ forever)
• a mobile app to make it easier to discover sculptures nearby ("go on sculpture walks")
  • ...and add sculptures from your phone
• tweak the main site to be less map-focused, and more sculpture photo focused
  • ...and more SEO friendly
• create a bulk upload interface
  • ...so that I can work through my backlog of 1000+ sculptures I've taken while traveling over the last 10 years

Implementation Details

As of 2025-09-12...

• Clojurescript + Reagent based frontend
• Clojure backend
• images uploaded to S3
• Pathom3 providing an EQL (GraphQL) like interface on top of
  • a Datascript in-memory database
  • a Postgres database (just for various PostGIS queries)
• ...being persisted to YAML files
• ...and managed by jGit (java binding for git)