Dear all

Wikimedia Sverige, through our new partnerships hub want to help make documenting built cultural heritage on Wikimedia projects easier. We want to work with Wikimedia communities to help you write about your heritage, document it through Wiki Loves Monuments and other activities. 

 

To start we are importing the data from the Wiki Loves Monuments database into Wikidata, building on the work that the community has done over the last several years. 

Adding information about monuments to Wikidata has several benefits including: 

• It makes it much easier to run Wiki Loves Monuments and makes it possible to use other tools to run e.g. Monumental. For example, monuments lists can be generated automatically based on Wikidata data, instead of having to maintain them locally on-wiki.

• It allows Wikipedia contributors to know what heritage is missing, for example we can create a redlist of the missing sites from Wikipedia.

• It makes the monuments list easier to keep up to date by empowering more editors to edit the items, not only those active on the local Wikipedia version and fluent in its language. We are working on additional Wikidata documentation to support this. 

To do this we we would like to work with communities to better understand their local data before we upload it:

1. What is the state of the data? E.g when was it added, is it out of date? Have you manually added or changed the data from the original source?

2. Where did the data come from? Is it available publicly? Can we download it easily?

3. Are there any additional sources of data you would like to include in your Wiki Loves Monuments lists?

We are currently updating the page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_WLM/Status, which contains an overview of all the datasets in the Monuments database, in order to identify the regions with largest gaps and find out what already has been done by the community. You can add your comments there or on the talk page.

We have plenty of time until the next Wiki Loves Monuments, so we are looking forward to improving as much data on Wikidata as possible. 

Please get in touch with us by emailing Alicia.fagerving@wikimedia.se

Many thanks 

John Cummings

Wikimedia Sverige