I definitely agree with Charles that a first step would have to be contacting the relevant bureaucracies. Our experience in all countries so far is that they are thrilled to work with us and share information. In general monuments are not considered a sexy topic, and Wikipedia is for those institutions a very interesting partner in that respect. We can motivate large numbers of people and interest them in heritage, and even find numerous mistakes in their databases.
But yes, someone has to do that - and it is definitely sufficient work to keep busy. That is not extraordinary - it happens in over 15 countries throughout Europe, and most of them purely by volunteers. The chapter could especially be helpful in motivating these volunteers, chanelling their efforts and coordinating stuff. Hence Mike Peel was right when he mentioned that if there are no volunteers, it ain't gonna work.
I was (and am) very sorry to find out that there was seemingly no interest from the UK to run Wiki Loves Monuments, but that is in the end your call. I do hope that with more time to use, there will be a WLM UK next year.
With kind regards,
Lodewijk
2011/7/13 WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com
Having looked at some of the entries I would just like to point out that the data seems to be stored by local authority rather than postal geography - which is possibly why one of the sites I previously looked at was riddled with errors.
WSC
On 13 July 2011 12:06, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 13/07/2011 11:39, rodward@rodward.plus.com wrote:
Sorry I seem to have put a cat amongst the pigeons with my query about
the
UK not being included in Wiki Loves Monuments.
The discussion is certainly worth having.
Following these discussions I took at look at the EH Spatial Data page (
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/archives-and-collections/nmr...
).
I presume the database format which is causing problems is ESRI? After a bit more digging I found the technical instructions for this format at http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdfbut it is way beyond my database abilities. Would someone at Village pump (technical) be able to convert it into anything useful or easy to use?
Yes, that looks like progress. Technical matters tend to be the long suit among Wikimedians.
Charles
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org