[Maps-l] Getting some batches of old maps ready for Commons

Hi everybody, I am trying to prepare some batches of maps for upload to Commons, from some of the images uploaded by the British Library to Flickr that have now been georeferenced; but I have got some questions, and I could also use some help, particularly with adding names/titles to maps on the BL georeferencer that don't have them. An overview page for the project can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat… Here's a more detailed post I sent earlier today to the Wikimaps group on Facebook. Apologies for the cross-posting, but I wasn't sure where the best place was to send it to, for the right people to see it: ----- People may remember that three years ago we found and tagged over 50,000 maps and plans in the million images uploaded to Flickr by the British Library. Since then, over half the maps have now been georeferenced on the BL's Georeferencer. It would be good to start getting some of the maps uploaded to WikiCommons. Starting with the UK I've therefore created pages for a dozen proposed initial batches to upload, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MC_upload_prep_pages giving current-best proposed identifications, filenames and categorisations, There's also a proposed general project strategy page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat… I'd really appreciate any thoughts or feedback that people have on these -- I feel that I've been slightly finding my way in the dark, so it would be good to know if people feel this is on the right track, and/or if there are any ideas or suggestions that come to mind. There are also some specific areas where any help would be really appreciated: * Map titles. Currently there are titles entered on the BL Georeferencer for only about half of the georeferenced maps. (It was an optional stage, easy to miss out). It would be incredibly helpful if we could start filling in the ones that are missing. These are currently shown as pink highlighted links on the batch pages. Note that it's also necessary to make a minor edit on the map to get the Georeferencer to pass the update to its central spreadsheet -- in some cases there /is/ a title, but it never got reflected to the central list for this reason, because there's not been any subsequent edit to the map. I'll try to update the batch pages at least once a day, to track progress. [[Added on Facebook: One thing I should add, when adding names to maps, is that I find it helpful to work in groups of about 5 links at a time. So: open 5 in georeferencer, then click the map tab for each of the 5, then open Flickr pages, then add title & make null edit. Each of these processes takes a while for the page to load, but working on a group of 5 at a time, you can keep going with the next step for the next one without having to wait.]] * More georeferencing. At the moment maps from UK-related books are about 80% georeferenced. But the average for most places is only about 50%. So if there's a part of the world you would like to see fast-tracked into the next lot of batches, finishing the georeferencing for more of the maps from there would be really helpful. For links and latest progress, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat… * Hierarchies and category schemes. The batching and categorisation is based on the hierarchical region-by-region analyses in this category: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MC_map_identification-in-progre… But these are based on modern countries and regions, returned by OSM's Nominatim service. It would be really valuable to have input from people who have a better knowledge of the countries and their histories, to get a better idea of what subdivisions would make best sense for categories and at what levels to stop subdividing), given also that the maps are mostly 19th century, so there may also be historic subdivisions which are quite different to current ones; what towns and cities should be pulled out for their own categories of old maps and plans; whether there are particular things it is worth trying to identify and pull out by bounding box; etc. * Map description pages on Commons. I am thinking the uploads to Commons should use the "Map" description template. But I want to make sure I will be using it properly. So I've gone through the template field-by-field at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Map#Preparing_for_an_uploa… with questions to see if I'm on track. In particular, I've put some questions there about e.g. the right way to use "map location" when the subject of the map may be quite complex, such as showing a part of a river in a particular county; "map date"; proper use of "title" vs "description"; "map type"; etc. -- and it would just be generally good if somebody could sanity-check what I'm proposing to do, well before the start of any uploading. I've also suggested adding quite a few further fields to the template, for example "book-title", "volume", "page", "publication-place", "book-author", "book-collaborator", "scan-resolution", "zoom-level". Would all of these be acceptable? Plus it would also be nice to make a much more prominent link to the BL Georeferencer. Feedback on any or all of the above would be very useful. At the end of the day these are only scans from books, rather than more luxury stand-alone maps. But there is still a lot here that I think would be very useful to have on WikiCommons, so I am very interested to know what people think. ----- Again, if people could give any feedback or suggestions, I would be very grateful. All best regards, James. --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. http://www.avg.com