Hi all,
In this discussion I see multiple things being suggested, or maybe only thought of.
* Moving the monument database to Wikidata: for the 2015 edition it will not be possible because of the amount of workload. If it is possible for the 2016 edition I do not know, but keep in mind that there is more needed then only moving some data from location A to location B. There is a complete infrastructure behind it that needs to work. Let's not think too light hearted about this, the infrastructure is vital and crucial.
* Lists of monuments maintained in one place: sorry to say, but to get this completely maintained only in Wikidata is a fairytale. Not because it is not possible, but because there are people involved and there are requirements set for articles/lists by communities. From the Wikidata perspective it sounds perhaps ideal to maintain it in one place, but then the (whole) Wikipedia perspective is missing. Then you can say that you edit Wikipedia a lot, but then you missed the point. There is a big clash between some users who have the Wikidata perspective who think a lot of codes in Wikipedia articles is okay, and users from the Wikipedia perspective who think all those codes in articles are not okay. Wikipedia is strongly built from the perspective that anyone can edit articles, and this is something that made Wikipedia big and is often considered an important characteristic of Wikipedia. Of course you can say that users can edit Wikidata when there are codes in Wikipedia, but that is thought too simple for multiple reasons. There will be communities that want to choose themselves which photo they want to show in their monument list (instead the photo from Wikidata), many descriptions of monuments in the list are altered and have footnotes and internal links, many descriptions and other fields are edited/expanded/updated, while Wikidata shows a different text or Wikidata has not the possibility to contain certain complex data. And the majority of users on Wikipedia experience Wikidata as too difficult to easily work with (seeing the Dutch community). (These are just a few issues of a lot more. And this is of course not specifically WLM, but generic.)
I think that the ability to edit the lists in ways Wikidata can't handle, is especially wanted on Wikipedias of the local language. At the same time I think that we need to work to the situation that for example monuments from the Netherlands can be shown on a list in the Japanese Wikipedia and many others. Maintaining lists in 200+ Wikipedias is not possible I think, so the idea of a centralised database is needed, but needs more thinking about how this can work in practise.
Another issue there is, is that Wikipedia is built on being able to click on top of the page and edit it without having to struggle with codes. Their are and will be a lot of Wikipedias where it is not acceptable to put a large amount of codes in the main namespace. A solution for that is simple, like categories, lua, portals, etc automated lists need their own namespace, like a list namespace. Then the article namespace remains freely editable and at the same time the information of automated lists is available in the local Wikipedia in the local language.
* Having all monuments in Wikidata: I am not sure if anyone mentioned this, but this should be the first step and only when this is completed we can think of further steps. And then I assume all the data of the database can be added to Wikidata, I am not sure if this is possible. Nevertheless I think all the monuments should have an item in Wikidata. For some countries this is the case already, for most countries this seems not the case. For these monuments in Wikidata we need to set some criteria. There are multiple criteria to be set, but one of them is at least to have *every* monument in Wikidata having a unique identifier.
Also all monuments in Wikidata need additional information to be able to identify a monument in Wikidata as a monument on location. These include address, coordinates, municipality or other
administrative territorial entity (this should be the lowest level possible), type of monument, and more. And there are more criteria that need to be set before it can be used worldwide.
If it is not possible to set for every monument a unique ID, Wikidata is not suitable for usage in Wiki Loves Monuments. A unique identifier for each monument is crucial throughout the whole infrastructure, the infrastructure has been built on this.
* Lists, rows in lists, articles about an individual monument on Wikipedia, categories on Commons and Wikidata items all need to be connected with each other. I think it is already possible for a part in Wikidata. However, this is far from ready to be used. Adding information to Wikidata is great, and that is what many people do, but there is a high need for connecting Wikidata items with for example categories on Commons. For any future tooling, scripts, gadgets, etc, this is needed in general, but specific for WLM too. The importance of this part is so much underestimated.
Greetings,
Romaine