The Japanese Art Frog Mystery. Or how my Wikipedian habits plunged me… | by Yavien von Hevring | Medium

To paraphrase a certain public figure, there truly are rabbit holes everywhere for those with the eyes to see. This one started pretty innocuously, with a Tumblr post (with all the reblogs in the link). Of course I have seen those goofy-looking frogs from Japanese art before, I vaguely remember planning to set one of them as my Discord profile picture because they are literally me, and then ADHD getting the better of me. This time, a thought struck me: if all of those frogs are old artwork by long-dead artists, they should be eligible for a public domain Wikimedia Commons upload. Maybe they already are there? That wasn’t the case. I found the second frog from the post, attributed to Ito Jakuchu in his Commons category, but not the first (that I later found and uploaded, together with the frog vs. fugu sumo), and Matsumoto Hoji didn’t have a category (that I created). But hey, a quick search led me to The British Museum gift shop and their profile of Matsumoto Hoji. It includes scans of

To paraphrase a certain public figure, there truly are rabbit holes everywhere for those with the eyes to see. This one started pretty innocuously, with a Tumblr post (with all the reblogs in the link). Of course I have seen those goofy-looking frogs from Japanese art before, I vaguely remember planning to set one of them as my Discord profile picture because they are literally me, and then ADHD getting the better of me. This time, a thought struck me: if all of those frogs are old artwork by long-dead artists, they should be eligible for a public domain Wikimedia Commons upload. Maybe they al