I was in the same discussion as Charles last night, and I'm one of the people who has categorised bits of the Geograph backlog.
Currently we have 1.7 million images from the Geograph on Commons, roughly two thirds of the Geograph has been loaded and that bit constitutes two thirds of the Geograph. The Geograph is a UK and Ireland project, and its 2.5 million images are probably rather more images than Commons has from the British isles, even including the 1.7 million geograph ones loaded so far. The bot lad was stopped due to categorisation problems, much is done by geocode and there are anomalies, and not just the predictable ones of places on either side of the Solent being categorised to the wrong shore.
We don't know how big the categorisation backlog is because Catalot won't remove the uncategorised Geograph template - though it is possible that we might get a bot to fix that.
The migration is unlikely to resume en masse, but the licenses are compatible so we can still suck in the images we want.
I'd suggest that we run a WLM contest asking people to add war memorials and listed buildings that we don't have images of or views of those images that we don't already have. Obviously we don't want yet more images of the Gherkin, Tower Bridge or Buckingham Palace.
But there are circa 30,000 war memorials in the UK and we only have a minority of them.
As for judging, it is easy to create userboxes for participants to claim, much more difficult to judge thousands of images and fairly choose a winner.
On the categorisation side I think we could do some outreach work and recruit people to categorise images of the UK. I'd be up for a training session if we put an ad in Metr or somesuch inviting people to help.
WSC
On 18 January 2012 03:38, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I would argue that the UK is a uniquely bad place for wikipedia loves monuments. Not only has it already been done directly:
http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/
But geograph has also covered a lot of the ground. Repeatedly.
So what are the alternatives. If you want to insist on architecture then everything listed in the Pevsner Architectural Guides is an option. At least the stuff there has a reasonable chance of being notable. Alternatively everything listed in the Defence of Britain project
http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/dob/
While I think photos of everything there exist they are not all online.
If people are prepared to move away from monuments options include every single species native to the UK and underwater wrecks (which have a higher challenge aspect). The species approach has the advantage that we could also include videos.
-- geni
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