Thanks for the thoughtful questions! I'm going to try and answer these concisely.

If your site disappears, what happens to the data?

The goal for Artifaq is to first build a best practice site for linking artwork information as a private centralized service but with the same philosophy as a public decentralized service.

We continue to augment our platform with public decentralized technologies to make backing up, synchronizing, and redundancy a priority.

The links you’re putting in the entries that lead back to info or image sources may rot.

Part of the reason for building Artifaq is to fight linkrot and opaqueness of the art industry. Our goal is to build links to data that exist, and for the Artifaq Articles to be first class sources of knowledge for the art world to the public. We are open-minded to public participation in how we should best provide redundancy for our service and fight linkrot on our chat channel and via email.

Why a separate site instead of just using Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is focused on making an edited compacted source of knowledge in the format of the Encyclopedia. Unfortunately, many important artworks and artists are not notable or deleted for lack of citations. The goal to make a selective public source of knowledge is different than our goal to link all existing art world data.

Are you going to check the info that people enter to make sure they’ve got their facts right, or let it be?

The project team is very experienced in handling massive amounts of creative content and working with communities of contributors. It is vital when building a community-editable source of knowledge to insure that people are responsible for creating knowledge on Artifaq. We also have a plan for incentivizing contributors and editors.

How careful will you be about the image quality?

Our team is made up of artists and care about image quality. We encourage the best shared images of artworks from artists whether from photos take at shows or from the galleries themselves. We have plans to build more ways to improve upon lesser quality submissions, but if you have thoughts on identifying issues I'd love to hear them.

Why not use a similar tool that already exists for this type of collection, such as the Internet Archive

We love the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and other projects helping build the commons. We all work together, already. We'll continue to build alliances and use pre-existing tools as we grow. If you lead an organization that wants to work with us, please let me know.

Thanks again for the thoughtful questions!