[Wiki Loves Monuments] Russia?

Lodewijk lodewijk at effeietsanders.org
Sat Sep 21 10:23:57 UTC 2013


Hi Yaroslav,

thanks for sharing your view on this matter. I also had a few discussions
about this situation with Lvova, Putnik and Reve in Moscow, and later also
with Spider. I realize it is a complicated situation - unfortunately not
really helped by the longstanding conflicts inside the Russian community (I
think it is no secret that you and Lvova are not exactly on good terms).

Based on the discussions we had in Moscow, where I was explained that they
were in a hard situation, and there was some serious discussion of not
having a WLM at all in Russia, we were able to work out a 'minimum'
scenario, and I helped Putnik understand how to create the lists. I'm very
glad he did even though he was extremely busy those days with non-wiki
work.

I can't say much about community discussions here, and I don't think
discussing that would be very fruitful on this list. However, what we can
do is try to analyze what would be constructive steps to resolve the
problems.

1) perhaps someone could take a look at how the special russian database -
russian monument lists interaction works. I understand from Yaroslav that
currently the database is the master, instead of the lists. It might make
more sense to reverse that: this is how it works in most countries. So if
someone adds a picture on Wikipedia, that the bot reads that, and adds it
to the database (like Multichill does with the international database).
This is primarily something technical, maybe Putnik can comment?
2) Adding commons templates: For each list, you could add a commons
template at the bottom, with a link to the relevant category where these
images should be added. This can be recognized by erfgoedbot, and then
erfgoedbot can move the images linked to those lists to the right category
on commons. This seems like something anyone could do - one edit per list.
3) If issue 1) is handled, anyone can make the fixes Yaroslav gave as
examples of errors in the lists. Lets be clear: every list in every country
contains mistakes and problems. It would be nice though if we can correct
them (as long as it doesn't damage the integrity of the official list - for
example, we should not add new monuments or remove them).

For the coordinates: Yaroslav indeed is right that there are coordinates
available for the closest big city. I actually agree with the decision of
the organizers that it is probably better to have a 'clean'  list on
Wikipedia, with only coordinates of the specific monument. Having
coordinates of the nearest big city would not be helpful of course.

I suggest to focus on improving the situation. Stopping the contest
wouldn't help anyone, and wouldn't solve anything - it doesn't come across
as a very constructive suggestion. Lets try to wok together where possible.
Also, lets please not use this list to just complain about something, but
primarily as a way to get more input, suggestions and help. I'm confident
that one way or another, we'll get this to work even better!

Best,
Lodewijk


2013/9/20 Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru>

> On 20.09.2013 20:38, Maarten Dammers wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> Can someone please tell me what is going on in Russia? Any plans to
>> fix it? Please reply because this is affecting other countries and
>> otherwise I'm forced to drop Russia.
>>
>> Maarten
>>
>> Ps Russia is not the only country with problems, see
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Commons:Monuments_**
>> database/Categorization/**Statistics<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Monuments_database/Categorization/Statistics>
>>
>>
>>
> Yes, sure.
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Commons:%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%**
> 80%D1%83%D0%BC#WLM-2013<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BC#WLM-2013>
>
> Putnik and Lvova, the coordinators of WLM-2013 (and occasionally also
> WLM-2012) somehow decided that the Wikipedia community would not be
> interested in WLM. Therefore they decided not to make any announcement of
> WLM on Wikipedia or Commons. None of them have any WLM-related edits on
> Commons in September.
>
> Last year, they have chosen to not use the lists, resorting to their own
> "database". This database is a deteriorated version of the official Russian
> monument database, which has all problems which the original database has,
> and a number of additional problems due to bad conversion and due to the
> lack of understanding what the cultural monument actually is. It only has
> one advantage - there are some coordinates over there, and monuments can be
> found according to these "approximate coordinates" which typically refer to
> the centers of closest big cities.
>
> They were repeatedly told that this is not the way to go but have chosen
> to ignore this critique, calling it "unconstructive". Last year, several
> Commons users tried to make heritage lists of reasonable quality, which
> requires a lot of manual work. These lists are still available on Commons,
> but were not used for 2012 and 2013 contest.
>
> This year, apparently after the meeting with Lodewijk in Moscow, they
> suddenly decided to participate and to use the lists. Indeed, they
> generated the "lists" from their database. As Maarten noticed, the "lists"
> are bot-generated, and adding the files there is useless since they are
> overwrited by bot. This completely excludes any community participation in
> the contest, except for uploading photos. On top of this, lists are full of
> errors. In particular, the list on Moscow Oblasts starts from three
> monuments allegedly located in the town of Kotelniki (all three not
> surprisingly have the same coordinates). In fact, the monuments are located
> in the Sakha Republic, 10K miles away, and this is pretty much obvious from
> the list.
>
> When the Commons Russian community realized that we get several hundreds
> photos per day, which are not properly categorized and have wrong labels,
> and Lvova and Putnik are not available to help with the photos and also not
> available to help the uploaders who have questions or misunderstand smth,
> and the photos are not used anywhere and can not be used, I had to open the
> discussion which I referenced above proposing to stop the contest. Lvova
> and Putnik have chosen to not take part in the discussion, having a
> discussion instead on the internal mailing list of Wikimedia.ru to which
> none of the active commons users subscribed. Essentially, putnik said that
> we are troublemakers, and if we work on Commons with the photos, this is
> our problem. This is the link to the mailing list archives:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/**pipermail/wikimedia-ru/2013-**
> September/thread.html<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-ru/2013-September/thread.html>(everything that has WLM in the subject).
>
> Lvova basically said she is not interested in what the community thinks.
>
> On the other hand, all Commons participants who took part in the
> discussion came to the consensus that the 2012 and 2013 organization was
> substandard and it should repeat in 2014. The Russian Wikipedia
> participants promised that in October, they will organize a drive to add
> photos to the articles (not to the lists, which are unusable). In the
> Russian Wikivoyage, where I am an admin, we are also interested in the
> photos, and we might be interested in working on compiling a high-quality
> cultural heritage lists. This issue is currently under discussion.
>
> The only strategy I see right now is to wait till October 1, and then for
> 2014, if there will be WLM-2014, find the organizers who do not regard
> community as a problem, and are more interested in doing the job and
> workimh together with the community. If such organizers for Russia would
> not be available, it is best that Russia does not participate in 2014.
>
> I personally will do my best in helping with the images on Commons (we
> currently have six users working there every day, including me) and with
> compiling the heritage lists from scratch, but this is more a longer term
> goal. May be if everything is really planned very well, the lists would be
> ready by September 2014, may be not. For the current lists, just forget
> them.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
>
>
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