Content Partnerships Hub/Helpdesk/WLM in Ukraine

WLM in Ukraine

Description

Wikimedia Ukraine reached out to the Helpdesk to get support on adding their lists on cultural heritage objects in Ukraine to Wikidata, to support the organization of Wiki Loves Monuments in the country.

Wiki Loves Monuments is a large-scale project in Ukraine – over the past 10+ years the campaign has resulted in more than 365,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage. The lists of monuments, which include over 92,000 monuments, are compiled by the organizing team and hosted on Wikipedia.

However, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the team has had limited volunteer resources, including technical capacity to work on moving the lists to Wikidata. The request is to transfer the lists from Wikipedia to Wikidata, and support the chapter in making sure that Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine can be run through Wikidata.

Justification

The Expert Committee gave strong support to the project, in spite of the large amount of time and resources it would take. There were however concerns that the openness of the data could be risky, if it could make it easier for actors with bad intentions to harm and destroy Ukrainian cultural heritage. Considerable amounts of time were spent on exploring the question. The solution was to avoid adding data in occupied territories in Eastern Ukraine, even if they are on Wikipedia and in the Monuments Database. The main focus has thus been Western and Central parts of Ukraine.

Result

92 000 items (out of 95 000) have been uploaded. The majority was newly created items, only a small part of them existed before on Wikidata.
- Issues included administrative locations (it was difficult to make sure that the correct WD item was added), coordinates (not added in occupied territories).
- After the first upload, some additional maintenance work has done, using uk.wikipedia.org as source:
  - Adding Heritage status
  - Grouping monuments that are parts of largest complexes, e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4240278#P527
  - Roughly 360 building complexes (eg Genoese Fortress) were assigned their constituent parts, using has parts. In turn, 2000 objects (parts of complexes) were linked to their complexes.
All items with identifiers (large query) can be found here.
An overview of types of monuments is available here.
There were already many Commons categories with the monument templates, which made it easy to connect to the items.
The items include many burial places etc. that lack coordinates.