On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:18:32 +0100, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
Hi Yaroslav,
...
regions does not work properly).
Do these monuments have the same status? For example in the Netherlands we have Rijksmonumenten for the state monuments, but also Gemeentelijke monumenten which are designated by the municipalities. So how is the progress going with the federal database? What are the plans? Are you going to put the lists in the main namespace on Wikipedia? A broken and incomplete database is always better than no database at all.
<...> I did not discuss it with the organizers (and for Russia, there are currently no organizing team anyway).
No team in Russia? Russia pulled of such a nice competition last year in
so little time. This year has so much potential. Would be a waste if Russia wouldn't be joining in. What happened with the people who organized it last year?
Maarten
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