Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in the United Kingdom

The main planning talk page for Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in the United Kingdom can be found at Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in the United Kingdom/planning. Please post planning discussions there.

Need to kick-start WLM 2013 in the UK if it is going to happen

A few of us had a brief phone meeting about WLM UK 2013 over a week ago (Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013_in_the_United_Kingdom/planning), but I can't see any on-wiki progress since. If we are to run the competition in the UK this year, some hard work is now very much overdue. We are already quite some time behind on the timeline (see Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013_in_the_United_Kingdom).

It would be a shame if the UK missed out again, for the 3rd year running, due to lack of interest.

My understanding is that WMUK is fully behind the community in backing this, and presumably what is needed is some greater volunteer action.

I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but unless another volunteer is in the middle of doing something I will in the next few days post some additional planning suggestions here and will also advertise on some VPs to to try to bring in more help, as we certainly don't have enough people at the moment.

Any thoughts? --MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:09, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

There's a lot of interest in something happening, but no-one seems willing to stand up and start pushing forward (for myself, I simply don't have time, and I think many others are the same). By all means take a lead and I'll be behind you :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 17:16, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Frankly, I found about this very late. It was advertised on the Wikiproject Lincolnshire talk page, and the county projects are pretty moribund, especially in the summer. There are a lot of very good photos in Geograph but the exercise of porting them to Commons was never repeated, and many of those that have been ported have some pretty strange categories. I must have taken around 250 photos of Lincolnshire out of Rutland this year. I think that it would have been a really good idea to advertise this little exercise on http://www.geograph.org.uk/discuss/ at the very beginning.--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:36, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

It was very optimistic to suppose that armies of people would come forward to add wikilinks to automatically generated tables, and tidy them up generally. The List of monastic houses... pages have taken around 4 years to get to some sort of shape. Though they now have those amazing big maps at the top of the county pages. That would look good on these lists too!--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:43, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and the column labelled 'Completed' appears, in the case of churches to contain the earliest date, not the most recent one! an odd definition of 'completed'.--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:43, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Grade II listed

Whilst I appreciate that including grade II listed buildings would make the lists longer, they would give our photographers more targets, including buildings that we don't yet have photographs of Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 16:24, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Don't Grade IIs account for around 90% of listed buildings? That would make the lists a *lot* longer. I'm in favour of more targets in principle, but only if the volunteers can cope with the extra work it creates. It's also worth noting that Grade IIs aren't usually considered notable. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:58, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Grade II is not very discriminating: almost any building which is pre-Victorian and hasn't been heavily modified is listed. As a result, two or three things become a problem if we use Grade II:

a) The lists become huge. Ten times as large, easily.

b) Grade II contains many of the "non-building" listings; looking at the 703 Grade II in Cambridge, the first few on the list include a statue, a boathouse, a couple of walls, and some gates. On my way to work, I cycle past two telephone boxes, an unremarkable river lock, some respectable terraced cottages... all grade II listed, and all within a few hundred meters on the same road. They're individually registered, but they're not what the general public would consider "listed buildings" (and personally I'd argue that a lot simply aren't interesting from Commons' perspective)

c) Because it contains so many buildings, a lot of them are still people's homes. This gets us into some complicated and concerning issues; I am not sure there's much benefit to running a contest encouraging people to go and take lots of pictures of relatively anonymous houses, and it's quite possibly going to backfire if we do. It's still something of an issue with WLM in general, but I'd argue that a Grade I or II* building is less likely to feel weird in this regard, and Grade II almost certainly contains a much higher number of private residences both proportionately and absolutely. Andrew Gray (talk) 19:08, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Its been done:

http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/

Geni (talk) 23:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

It has indeed been done, but perhaps we should walk before we can run seeing as the UK hasn't done WLM before. If we have a great response this year, perhaps next year we can re-examine the issues surrounding Grade II listed buildings, particularly how we deal with points B and C as highlighted by Andrew. But for now, it seems sensible to limit ourselves to Grades I and II*. 50,000 I and II* listed buildings and their equivalents doesn't exactly leave participants limited for subjects to photograph. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 09:45, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

That seems like a sensible suggestion. Hopefully a successful first year will encourage more people to get involved, so adding the grade IIs would hopefully be less of a drain on volunteer resources. On a bit of a tangent, I'd love to see scheduled ancient monuments included, but I suppose they can wait til next year as well. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:39, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, agreed. Scheduled ancient monuments is definitely a category I'd like to see in future contests, but as we've never done this before the plan is to keep the first competition quite simple. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

(ec) Scheduled monuments are tricky. Some are buildings, such as Rochester Castle, but where that is the case they are usually also listed buildings. It seems most are earthworks, which are very difficult to take interesting and useful photos of. Maiden Castle in Dorset for example is a spectacular example of an Iron Age hillfort, the largest in England I think, but photos from ground level don't capture the sheer scale of the site. What scheduled monuments really need is some kind of aerial photography, but I'm not sure that's a realistic hope. There are other issues to consider (many are on private property), so like with Grade II buildings it's something better left for another year IMO. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:58, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Indeed; I found that when I wrote en:Scheduled Ancient Monuments in Coventry, but there are a few exceptions to the rule; en:Vignoles Bridge was a notable example, but I'm fine with leaving them until WLM is more established in the UK. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:15, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

We could always add "grade II excluding private houses" however I think I see the way the wind is blowing. But there will be many places where we simply don't have unphotographed Grade I or Grade II* buildings. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 16:15, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

What we already have

• Category:Grade I listed buildings and Category:Grade II* listed buildings both have huge numbers of images. Are we going to integrate what we already have into the tables so people know whether or not a particular building has already been photographed? Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 16:27, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

We could, but having more photos of things that already have images on Commons isn't an inherently bad thing, in my opinion. Getting people involved is at least as important as getting the photos. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:35, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

OK, I've added pictures for about half of Grade I listed buildings in South Kesteven.

Some of them were already in Commons, others I have added from the Geograph project. Several needed re-categorising, as they were labelled as in Rutland or somewhere! Someone else can do some more! --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:31, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Harmful edits

I'm concerned that good-faith en.WP edits (hundreds of them), relating to WikiLovesMonumnts in the UK, have i) used date templates where they're not appropriate and ii) lost lots of existing wikilinks, including disambiguation, which other editors are now being asked to replace. Please see en:Wikipedia talk:UK Wikipedians' notice board#Lists of listed buildings: harmful edits for examples and discussion.

We may need a mass revert (after which the edits can be reinstated in better shape); or a bot to do cleanup.

There doesn't seem to be a centralised page, equivalent to this one, on en.WP. I may not see replies here. Andy Mabbett (talk) 15:16, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

I've been warned off by this and only added pictures!--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:45, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your help Robert! Many hands make light work and all that. If you felt able, it would be wonderful if you could help with sorting the dates in the tables and adding/re-adding links for those buildings that have articles. I know we lost a lot of links by moving to the table format (many of which have now been re-added), but the tables contain an awful lot more information. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 10:12, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

I have found a few more pages and done some wikilinking for the buildings I already did. I am sufficiently unmoved by any problems over date formats etc to leave that to someone who cares.--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 19:26, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion: leaflets to hand out to photographers on the street

It occurred to me today, while walking through Chester to the wmuk:Wikipedia Takes Chester venue and walking past people taking photos, that leaflets that could be handed out to photographers on the streets (or at historical sites) to encourage them to enter the photos that they're already taking into the competition, or to venues or tourist offices for distribution there. It's probably a bit late now to make this suggestion, sorry (unless leaflets already exist, or could be printed in the next few days), so perhaps this is something to consider for next year's competition? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:31, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we have anything which fits the bill, so this will probably have to wait until next year. To be effective it would have to be short and to the point. Perhaps an A5 handout would work. Do you have any suggestions for what could be included? Also we would need to think about how to disseminate them. Would they be sent out to particular organisations, or would we be asking volunteers to stand in the street handing them out? Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 13:39, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

A5 would be good, or possibly even just business cards with a very short description and a pointer towards the website. I'd suggest both approaches for distribution (but not necessarily standing in the street - more spotting and targeting people taking photos). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:30, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of a business card size thing, that could work quite well. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:22, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Heritage Open Days

It is Heritage Open Days this coming weekend and many places that are not normally accessible by the public will be open. Would it be worth giving a push to see if some unusual images can be obtained from places that are not normally accessible. See website for places/events participating. Keith D (talk) 22:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

There was a WMUK blog post about this at [1]. It's a shame that these are taking place over such short a time period. :-( Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:49, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Welsh Mobile Upload

Now  Done - Llywelyn2000 (talk) 08:25, 18 September 2013 (UTC)