[Wiki Loves Monuments] Pulled the plug on ErfgoedBot

Sun Jun 28 12:40:03 UTC 2015

Antanana,
Thanks for your reminder, and yes, even in my (relatively safe) world, I
too have seen two of the buildings that I photographed for WLM burn down.
You are quite right to point out that it's not just modern architecture and
art that is affected when erfgoed bot goes away. If erfgoed bot goes away,
it means we need an army of volunteers to make manual updates to the lists
(or we need listeria to be accepted into namespace 0 on all language
wikipedias before September).

Asking us as WLM volunteers to help get rid of Russavia or to help stop
people being angry at the WMF, is like asking the wind to stop blowing. The
bot is not being taken offline btw because Maarten is so disappointed in
the behavior of Commons community members. The problem is out of his
control - the software is changing so that he would need to rewrite his
code, and the effort that is needed for that would probably only be useful
this year, because hopefully by next year we can run WLM from Wikidata
entirely with the new query engine. Besides, Maarten is not giving up his
work entirely for heritage - he is doing some really great stuff at the
moment for other cultural heritage interests by importing data about
paintings into Wikidata. Soon we can all be virtual armchair painting
gallery visitors to the world's most visited museums.

Jane

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 1:57 PM, attolippip <attolippip at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Jane, Maarten,
> Dear all,
>
> I am actually sorry that some of you get depressed and dissapointed
> Please do not give up. Well, it is easier, I agree. But other things are
> to be taken into consideration
>
> For example, a whole lot of you do not have war going on in your country.
> And we have
> We lose people, the best people maybe, as they are acting on their dreams,
> and people are to have dreams to move on
> We lose cultural and natural monuments. Because of war and because of
> simple negligence
>
> This wooden church has got burned just because [1]. And as the war is
> going on, we are not sure if people (surely not our state) can spare enough
> resources to get it rebuilt. We are lucky to have its image before the fire
> [2] and WLM is to be 'blamed' here
>
> This natural monument is called Balka Ploska [3]. The images were uploaded
> during Wiki Loves Earth contests [4].
> In 2002 this cute animal - *Hemiechinus auritus -* was discovered there
> [5], and it it a very rare animal in our country
> Balka Ploska got burned because of war [6]...
> You can rebuilt a cultural monument (to some extent of course), but it is
> kind of impossible to restore nature...
> Well, we do have some positive video coverage from Chernobyl Exclusion
> Zone [7]. We actually received a  wildlife reserve thanks to the nuclear
> disaster. There are wolves there, foxes. They are not afraid of people [8]
>
> What I am awkwardly trying to tell you all here, is this: please consider
> the things from different points of view
> The hardships are going to to exist everywhere. That's a given
> But do think that you can make the difference here, I believe.
>
> Photos can be uploaded locally. Used locally. We are going to have 'a
> world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to
> the sum of all human knowledge'. Just need more time and efforts
>
> Anyway thank you for everything done up to this moment. It matters
>
> P.S. ErfgoedBot (I believe) matters a lot for people outside the Wikimedia
> Commons
>
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1rUccd_0E8
> [2]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%A6%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%A1%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%B2%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%97_%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%96_130727_5132.jpg
> [3] https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1931998
> [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Balka_Ploska
> [5]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berkah.13.Kookherd_%D9%83%D9%88%D8%AE%D8%B1%D8%AF.jpg
> [6] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zbSMscEgA8nQ.k3-ikECY7sf0
> [7] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32452085
> [8] http://www.radiosvoboda.org/media/video/26975013.html
>
> Best regards,
> antanana
> ED of Wikimedia Ukraine
>
> 2015-06-28 14:02 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell <jane023 at gmail.com>:
>
>> Wow - I didn't know Russavia was still active on Commons, but there you
>> have it - blocks only are effective at banning relative newbies. I am sorry
>> to read about your lack of motivation, but frankly, with the direction
>> things are going in the European Parliament at the moment with FoP I see
>> bad times ahead for WLM in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. I find
>> the whole process that Julia Reda has been going through quite upsetting to
>> watch from the sidelines. Even though I know she has lots of supporters I
>> have been amazed at the attacks on her judgement, her program, her party,
>> and her work. In the Wikiverse I have always gravitated to the areas where
>> I feel my edits are likely to last the longest. I don't want to spend any
>> effort on things that *might* land in the waste bin when there is so much
>> to be done that is public domain no matter how hard you try to stuff it
>> into closed systems. Thus my motivation for WLM this year has dropped
>> drastically since the publication of the copyright harmonization report.
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Maarten Dammers <maarten at mdammers.nl>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've been running ErfgoedBot [1] since the start of Wiki Loves
>>> Monuments. ErfgoedBot still runs on old pywikibot compat code that will
>>> break soon [2]. I could invest time in updating the bot and I have been
>>> considering doing that for quite some time, but I realized I just don't
>>> have the motivation for it. Commons has become a toxic place dominated by a
>>> small group of very vocal users. These users don't seem to accept that
>>> Russavia is banned and to try to turn everything into "Commons community"
>>> vs "WMF" battle. I don't identify with that and I don't feel like investing
>>> time in a project where this behaviour is acceptable.
>>>
>>> Maarten
>>>
>>> [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ErfgoedBot
>>> [2]
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2015-June/001178.html
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
>>> WikiLovesMonuments at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
>>> http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
>> WikiLovesMonuments at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
>> http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/attachments/20150628/33dd8248/attachment-0001.html>