Commons:Monuments database in Russia

What is it all about?

Each country has long lists of protected natural sites and cultural heritage. They are central to popular photography competitions Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments that are organized every year by the Wikimedia movement. The lists of natural sites and cultural heritage monuments in Russia are maintained by the team of local organizers who also take care of the photos uploaded during these contests.

• Lists of natural sites
• Lists of cultural heritage

How is it organized?

Individual photos and categories are labeled with templates:

• {{Protected Area Russia}} for natural sites
• {{Cultural Heritage Russia}} for cultural heritage

These templates take one parameter, monument ID, which is based on the lists of natural sites and cultural heritage. The information about the monument, including its name, location, and geographical coordinates can be obtained using the monument ID. Additionally, the lists contain metadata, such as Wikidata IDs that facilitate connection to Wikimedia projects.

Categories and their place on Commons

Each photo is placed into categories of three types:

1. Categories of individual objects. As long as Commons adopts the highly restrictive and unjust policy of naming categories in English, categories of individual objects cannot be created automatically and must be manually crafted by our volunteers. This is a very slow process that lags behind the upload of new photos.
2. Generic categories Cultural heritage monuments in / Protected areas of. They remain in a somewhat untidy state because no uniform naming of Russian cities and districts is used on Commons.
3. Categories by ID are automatically added by our templates and adopt simple names Category:WLM/ID and Category:WLE/ID for cultural heritage and natural sites, respectively. These categories are not created as pages, but added to all WLM/WLE images, which is sufficient for generating galleries of images with a given monument ID. Example here. Such galleries are linked from our lists of natural sites and cultural heritage under the name "галерея". These numbered categories are vital for sorting images and finding images with a given ID. If you are unhappy about red links generated by these categories, propose a better way of finding an image based on monument ID.

Do's and don'ts

You can help us by doing the following:

• Add Commons categories to Wikidata items using the property P373
• Rename categories of Russian cities and districts as to make them standard and easily recognizable for bots (and don't forget to update category names on Wikidata!)
• Create interface for multi-lingual category names (Commons must be an international project)
• Create tags and other tools that facilitate automatic processing of Commons categories (currently, no automatic processing is possible)

You will make us a favor by not doing the following:

• Never modify {{Protected Area Russia}} and {{Cultural Heritage Russia}} without discussing the proposed changes
• Never nominate photos for deletion without making sure that the deletion will not harm our work

Remember: it's a huge database, and it's a huge effort to organize it. But this database is fragile. We will be very upset if you break it, intentionally or unintentionally.

No FoP in Russia

"There is no FoP for modern sculptures in Russia" is something that we hear way too often. When you see a photo of a Russian monument and want to nominate it for deletion, consider the following:

• Most of these photos will be perfectly fine when uploaded under fair use to Wikivoyage, Wikipedia, and other projects
• Most of these photos are used by one or more Wikimedia project
• Useful photos are lost because Commons users do not bother to inform other projects when photos are deleted

If you see a potential candidate for deletion, inform us in the first place. We will organize the file transfer and you will be able to delete the photo afterwards. Should you do it differently and nominate a WLM/WLE photo for deletion without informing us, this will be highly detrimental and disrespectful to our work. We don't like vandals.

Contacts

This activity is coordinated on Russian Wikivoyage, where you can find exhaustive discussions about lists of monuments and the strategies of image categorization. If you know Russian, you should read these discussions first. If you can't read Russian, feel free to ask questions:

• Alexander (I won't see your ping here; please, reach me in other projects)
• Yaroslav

Should you choose to perform actions before asking questions, your chances of getting detailed and polite answers will not be high.