Hi Jane,
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
What I really would like to know however, is whether the pictures that someone adds to an English list (so not Dutch, French or German) will make it into the monuments database on Commons? I assume there is some checks done on the leading language lists in order to update the database.
The answer is yes and no ;-) The monument database has different tables for each language, so there can be multiple tables for a single country, each containing the monuments listed in the specific Wikipedia (e.g. ch-de, ch-fr, ch-it each contain all Swiss monuments but in different languages).
I'm not sure if all of those are included in the monuments_all-table, though.
My question is, can there be more than one list? And what if a user adds a photo to Wikipedia, rather than Wikimedia Commons? I think these need to be caught and transferred by hand, but is that right?
The bot who builds the database crawls every Wikipedia it is set up for, but it actually doesn't have a look at the pictures. It just takes whatever is written in the "picture = " field of the template and assumes that if the field is not empty, it's a working link to a picture.
The feature where the bot tells you what pictures you might want to include in the lists by creating a list on the local Wikipedia just works for Commons though. It won't suggest pictures for monuments that already have a locally uploaded picture inserted into the list (see above), but it only looks for templated pictures on Commons. (By the way, it is really helpful to have all pictures on Commons if we want to import monument lists on other Wikipedias).
I hope this was a helpful.
Best regards,
Kilian