On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:18:32 +0100, Maarten Dammers <maarten(a)mdammers.nl> wrote: ... Hi Maarten, this is the situation with Russia how I see it. Other people may see it differently. 1. There is a federal database, http://kulturnoe-nasledie.ru/ . It contains a number of monuments marked as federal, a number of monuments marked as local (meaning Region level, similar to the Province level in NL), and a much bigger number of monuments marked as "level of protection unknown". Unknown does not mean it is actually unknown, in many cases it means "a secretary who typed the monument in was not able to figure out what level of protection is". In many case, what is federal is marked as local and vice versa. Additionally, the database suffers from other issues, such as it is clearly incomplete, at least where it can be compared with available regional lists, has overlaps (one monument listed several times under several IDs) and unusable for some regions (the number of monuments is clearly much lower that it should be). For some Regions (not for all of them) there are lists of federally and/or locally protected monuments, which may be the same or may be more complete that the federal database, but have no identification number or have a number incompatible with the database format. We discussed the situation and decided that every monument listed in any official document (database or regional lists) as protected is eligible. What do we do with the id for the monuments which did not make it to the database is still to be decided. May be indeed location + address would work (sometimes this combination is not unique). 2. On basis of the documents we have we are compiling the lists of the monuments split by Region, and, if necessary, further by district. The progress can be monitored here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Lists_of_European_Monuments/Russia The lists are being compiled on Commons, and I am currently the only user working on the lists (Some other users expressed interest in working on the lists, but did not actually start working on them). Most of the lists are for technical reasons in my user space, but they will be moved to the main namespace in Commons in August and split into districts. I still reasonably expect that by September 1 all lists will be ready and hopefully the existing images will be added to the lists. It is not realistic to expect that coordinates will be added, unless we have a major breakthrough. As soon as I am doing the lists, they will be on Commons before and during the contest and may be copied to Russian Wikipedia afterwards, but if somebody else takes over the list coordination, and if the synchronization is realized, they could be moved to Russian Wikipedia beforehand. 3. The Russian Chapter is in principle responsible for all the decisions. This Chapter is dormant, consists of about a dozen of people, does not accept new members (and never did), and has little support in the community. Last year, the decision was made in mid-July, Anastasia Lvova (User:Lvova) coordinated the effort, finding sponsors and the jury, and Pavel Kaganer (User:Kaganer) somehow coordinated the creation of lists for Saint Petersburg (which is one Region out of 83), and he is still categorizing the photos which were submitted during the 2011 WLM. From what I know, these two users have done the bulk of the work, and others (except for jury, of course) have done very little to nothing. I am not sure whether there was any dedicated team. Russia was only able to start their participation on September 15. When I suggested in August that WLM 2011 could have been held for the whole country with the existing lists, I was told to mind my own business. For the record, I have been involved in the monument protection in Russia since 2004, and the organizers must have known this. 4. In October, I started the discussions knowing we need time to prepare WLM 2012. The discussions are held on the dedicated page on Commons. Whereas I managed to solve a number of problems related to the lists and databases (for example, as outlined in #1), but generally all I got were promises like "next week / next month / sometimes I will start working on this". So far, none of these promises has been held. The only user currently active is User:Kaganer, and he is also a member of the Russian Chapter. In December, I asked the Russian Chapter to make a decision whether Russia would participate, and got no reaction (if there were any discussions in the Chapter, I was not informed, since they maintain a closed mailing list with non-public archives). I assume this is related to the fact that there is no coordinator. User:Lvova mentioned she has no time, and she would only decide in April, and most probably she would not be interested. I am also not the best candidate since I am not a Russian resident and also I am not on speaking terms with Mr. Medeyko who is the Chapter President and who was instrumental in chasing me out of Russian Wikipedia. I also currently have no account on Russian Wikipedia. I volunteered to prepare the lists and I can also do communications with the international team, but I am certainly not in a position to find sponsors or even to compile a jury. I am afraid again nothing would happen until mid-August and then Russia either will drop out or the Chapter will appoint someone not even informing me. Cheers Yaroslav

Hi, On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Vicenç Riullop <vriullop(a)hotmail.com> wrote: In Germany, we have hundreds of different lists and databases, since in some states every municipality is in charge of their cultural heritage monuments, which means they will create an individual list. Most of them don't have identifiers, and for many regions we don't even have lists at all. So what we did is work with 16 campaigns, one for each state, where we asked the uploaders to enter the name of the municipality, but as you can imagine, this led to a lot of work that had to be done afterwards. What you see in the database are either the states where we have lists and identifiers (right now there are just two, de-he and de-by, but most likely two or three more will follow soon) or in the case of Cologne and Bergheim the specific databases for two cities we did projects in. As you can imagine, if we'd continue this way for all the other cities we have template based lists for by now, this would be a real mess. So we're trying to find a solution here, before we add more of the smaller lists. When you create an own ID, this is almost always a case of original research and I'm really not in favor of creating a "Wikipedia identifier" for objects, but maybe this is the only way to solve the problem? Kilian

The official lists from Austria do also not have an unique identifier, but we solved that problem. We just asked our national monument department and after some talks the sent us their identifiers. So we are now able to update our data yearly. Have you tried to talk to them Andrea? Best Michael Am 05.03.2012 22:07, schrieb Maarten Dammers:

Hi Andrea, On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote: I suggest you sort out some of the legal issues first, and once you decide you're going to participate (which I hope you will!), get in touch with us Germans. We're having the same trouble (and some other nations might too), so maybe we can have a page on Commons where we can discuss possible solutions and share what works and what doesn't. We'll be discussing this topic at the end of March in Dresden, where most of our organizing team meets for the first time and hopefully come up with some ideas there as well (I'll try to remember to keep you updated on what we come up with, otherwise just send me a short message at the beginning of April). Once we decide on and test one or two solutions and find that they work properly, we can use those for all the small lists in every country doing WLM. Then it's also easier and more worthwhile to ask for additional features in the monuments database, we're probably going to need those if we don't want to have a few hundred tables for both Germany and Italy alone (as opposed to one for all the other nations). Best regards, Kilian

Hi Andrea, Op 5-3-2012 23:35, Andrea Zanni schreef: I think you have two legal issues to solve: 1. Copyright of the lists 2. The whole take photos in Italy of monuments problem If you get the first part solved we can start putting lists online. Maarten

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Maarten Dammers <maarten(a)mdammers.nl> wrote: At the end of the day, the list would have a great encyclopedic value per se, and having the possibility to have WLM is a plus. Marco