We want to build the world's largest multilingual wiki-based1 data base of art and antique objects.
Imagine a global digital encyclopedia with thousands of volunteers, each adding a few pages, documenting their collections, their skills, their expertise. Imagine a specialized and structured "wikipedia" for the Art and Antique market, where every expert can share their knowledge with others, freely available to anyone who needs it, up to date, accurate, and available in all languages.
The key to making this work is two things:
- a global community of individual experts in museums, law enforcement, customs, art academia, auction houses, dealers, and the insurance industry.
- a powerful wiki platform that makes it easy for these experts to bring their knowledge together in one place.
Kempies.org will become the first international, standardized database for describing and classifying art, antiques and antiquities.
How does this work?
Experts come to Kempies.org because they have knowledge they want to share and they want the audience.
- An Italian dealer can be the reference and expert in 17th century micro mosaics.
- A Russian collector is passionate about “objet de vertu” by Carl Fabergé.
- A Chinese appraiser is a specialist in “Ming dynasty” sculptures.
- An emerging Iranian artist writes about new mixed media materials.
Experts can build their reputations since they will be directly associated with their contributions. But Kempies.org is not restricted to experts.
Non-experts can also contribute, in small and larger ways: by reading, improving, cross-checking, translating, updating and challenging information.
Thus all contributors can become authorities in their specific fields of expertise and interest.
Visitors come because they want the information. They can browse, search and watch (getting an email on changed or new information): objects, artists, biographies, materials, experts, auction results, exhibitions, contributors, personal pages, blogs, forums, and so on.
A detailed, accurate, global, and self-regulating database grows out of mutual self-interest.
