Re: [Wikimedia-l] Placebook Wiki Project Proposal

Thanks for your feedback Wil and glad that you like the idea. This is the link to a page giving some more detail on this proposal - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PlaceBook_Wiki Initially I was thinking that a new platform would be the way to go with this, as I had thought that the type of content being posted could be likely to contain more multimedia resources than the standard wiki postings and so was thinking about the volume of data that might need to be stored and how this could be linked in as flexible a way as possible - perhaps using a Graph database. I was also thinking that a new platform could allow us to tailor an API specifically for this using the GPS co-ordinates as the primary means of indexing information and that this could open up the data to being used in unexpected ways by other developers. However, that was before I had found out about the WikiData project, which as you suggested, could at first glance looks like it could be a good fit for adaptation for use with this proposal. I've not had a chance to study its data schemas in any depth to research its suitability in detail though, but am hoping to find time to do so soon, so any pointers about the best place to start would be gratefully received. The co-ordinates link you mentioned seems to give you geographical information about the location via a Geohack page, which is not without interest. However, it does not seem to be providing a gateway onto a richer set of resources about that specific location - so we don't seem to be able to access more narrative content with images and footage of significant events that may have occurred there or stories of those who have lived in this place. I like your thoughts about dataset mappings to jumpstart this and was thinking that the way to do this would be to team up with local historical societies to begin with to get them to take ownership of their local areas and begin to upload images and data with their commentaries and narratives. With an organisation like the Wiki Foundations backing this, it would lend a lot of credibility to the project and I'm sure this would be met with enthusiasm by professionals and amateurs alike, particularly if it was seen as a way of promoting local heritage. For instance, English Heritage already has a system of assigning blue plaques to houses of special interest in the UK and so I imagine it would be relatively easy to persuade them to link these into this kind platform, along with images of the people in question and more detail of what they did at the specific residence that was of such importance. Ideally I would hope that ordinary people accessing this information would start to realise that they could upload personal narrative and recollections to the same system, so in effect affording them an opportunity to create their own "blue plaque" and in so doing create a folk history of the locations in which they live. I think there is a real human need to try to leave a mark and record something of themselves within the landscape - you just need to look back at cave paintings to see that this is an ancient urge within us. This is one of the reasons I'm confident that a system similar to the one I've proposed is fairly inevitable, as it's ultimately motivated by human need but facilitated by current technology, rather than vice versa. My initial thoughts were that this natural desire could allow us to charge a small fee based on the number of megabytes posted, which could be used to guarantee the data storage for a certain number of years (or decades), as well as funding the project more widely and helping to finance the cataloguing of other items that could be of more general historical importance. Further thoughts anyone may have on this gratefully received. On Wednesday, 10 December 2014, 22:45, Wil Sinclair <wllm(a)wllm.com> wrote: I'd like to know more about the proposal; is there a page on Meta that describes it in more detail? Specifically, I'd like to know: * You mention "platform". Are you proposing a new top-level wiki project that would require critical mass to succeed? * Wouldn't this be a good fit for additions to the existing data schemas in Wikidata? Even if you have specific geo-oriented functionality in mind, it seems the current way to do this would be to build out tool on WMF Labs. * Is there a free dataset mapping events/people/places to coordinates that could be used to jumpstart the initiative? * I seem to remember seeing coords as structured data on some Wikipedia articles. Are there existing efforts to join/build on? I ask these questions in this forum, because I think that physically mapping data on Wikipedia and other projects is a great idea and could have a large and broad impact across all WMF-hosted projects. I look forward to the day that I can query our entire set of articles by what's happened, when it happened, who made it happen, and *where* it all went down. Best. ,Wil On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 3:39 AM, Joe Aeberhard <joe_aeb(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: