1) Our IDs. It is not quite easy to publish somewhere in a reliable source a database of 70,000 items. Especially given that this is still work in progress - we are lacking many lists - thus we have only about a half of total number, as estimated number of monuments in Ukraine is between 120,000 and 150,000. So far no one managed to publish a database of over 20,000 monuments, thus ours is definitely the best one, but we can hardly imagine who can publish this.

In addition, we do not have reliable sources (in terms of Wikipedia/Wikidata) that those objects are monuments - our usual sources are letters from local governments, in best case it's a PDF file, in worst case it looks like THIS http://toolserver.org.ua/132542.JPG

Of course we can try to add something like "Wikimedia Ukraine ID", but we reasonably expect to see it rejected - we did not even publish our lists in the Main namespace for this reason.

2) Adresses.

* First of all, there is no way we can have coordinates for all monuments - in one city it took about a week for a local resident to add coordinates to all monuments in his city - this requires advanced knowledge of local geography, like being able to distinguish "Central park" and "City park"

* Secondly, P969 is an option - but we need it to be multilingual. In case of big cities, we will most likely have street names and we need to have a cyrillic (Ukrainian) and latinic (English) versions for them. In case of Crimea, we happen to have addresses in Ukrainian and in Russian separately and we would need to prefer to keep both if we transfer on Wikidata.

* Thirdly, in some cases we have monuments located in an unknown village, i.e. a village that does not exist. In some cases it's a renamed villages (=we have an item for it), in some cases this village became a part of another village (=we change to this another village and put old village into address), in some cases it's an abandonned village (=we don't have an item for it), and in the worst case we do not know what it is (and we hope that a local resident will find it and fix it).

* Finally, we can have just no address and two items with the same name (e.g. Church, Common grave, Burial mound) with ID as the only way to distinguish them.

3) Oh, and third problem, a more fundamental one. Will Wikidata be used as a duplicate of on-wiki database (like erfgoedbot's database) or a main source of data? In the second case we need an easy tool being able to:

* retrieve all monuments in a given city / region (main way for people to find what they want to picture)

* ...and filter monuments of a given type (e.g. monuments of architecture of national significance - we have 4 types and 3 subtypes)

* ...and filter monuments built in a given year (FOP monitoring)

* update all monuments in a given region (we update lists yearly once we receive new ones, but we do not want to overwrite edits by other users if they fix mistakes, so we need to *compare* and overwrite)

* retrieve all monuments in a given region and  modify them manually (e.g. add coordinates)

All of this is rather easy to do with a wiki-based table, it is also rather easy to do with a good database, but we have a bad database, so what can we do with it?

Thanks,

Mykola

On 26 July 2015 at 12:39, Mykola Kozlenko <mycola-k@ukr.net> wrote:

 

1) Our monument IDs are the ones we invent ourselves. We have 4 types of monuments times 27 regions (+1 nationwide list), some of these lists have identifiers, some not. Identifiers are not unique even within the same list, e.g. one list has a few monuments with identifier "1", and in total we have several dozens monuments with identifier "1". Thus our governmental IDs are pretty useless, but does Wikidata accept original IDs created by Wikimedians?

No, but you could publish them/ have someone publish them.

 

2) Many of our monuments do not have precise addresses like "city, street, house number", but something like descriptions, e.g. "1.2 km north of the railway station, 500 m east of the road to (some village), 300 m west of the cemetery"  or "in the centre of the village, in the park behind the shop". Is there a way to describe this on Wikidata?

 

Give the coordinates.

In addition, we would be glad to know if there are any tools to migrate 70,000+ items to Wikidata, as doing this manually would be probably impossible... If not, we would be still interested in old good erfgoedbot who  did its job pretty well in our case.

Yes; for instance QuickStatements.

   http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/quick_statements.php

--

Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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