Hi everyone,

At http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011/progress and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/post_mortem we're talking about structured lists. You might wonder: How do I make these structured lists? In this post I will try to explain how to do it. It's actually not that difficult to create :-)

I will take Switzerland as an example. Their system is described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Inventory_of_Cultural_Property_of_Nationa... .

We're going to create or convert tables. For this we need to know the fields to include. Some important fields: * id - the unique id assigned by the local registry, this is the primary key * name - name of the object (or a description) * address - the address of the object * municipality - the municipality in which the object lies * lat - the latitude * lon - the longitude * image - image of the object You can of course add more fields and the name of the fields should probably be in the local language.

The fields I used for the Swiss monuments are: * image * name * address * municipality * CH1903_X (they use a strange lat/lon system in Switzerland) * CH1903_Y * KGS_nr - this is the unique id

Now we need to make two templates * A header template which is going to be at the start of each table * A row template. One row per monument containing all the information.

These templates make the lists look pretty and make it possible for a bot to harvest the information (more about that at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/template_syst... ).

For Switzerland I created http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:SIoCPoNaRS_header and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:SIoCPoNaRS_row .

Now we got the base of the template system. If you don't have any lists yet you have to get a dataset to start from scratch. If you already have lists you need to convert them. If you're lucky some bot operator is able to convert a lot of the lists automagicly with complicated regular expressions. With the Swiss lists I was able to convert quite a lot with a bot, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cultural_property_of_national_significa... (check the source and history). The remaining items need to be fixed manually, you should mobilize some users to help out.

Now you have structured lists! This is where I stand now with the Swiss project. I will do a follow up most when I got some of the nice tools working so we can actually make use of these structured lists.

Any questions?

Maarten