Grants talk:IEG/Funding for contest prizes and meetups for local cultural heritage content ingestion

Content ingestion

This term is very unclear, I don't understand what you actually want to get done. For instance, getting:

1. the metadata,
2. the actual stuff (e.g. a digitized book/photo), or
3. the information (e.g. article summarising information found on a book)?

and

• on Wikimedia projects pages/files or
• just anywhere suitable?

--Nemo 11:03, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your response! Metadata is what it is all about, yes, and get it on Wikipedia projects, also yes. If you look at Wiki Loves Monuments, the metadata is the property of the listholders, and the lists on Wikipedia point to the metadata at the unique id level. This is what the monuments database is for. The idea of the database is keeping track of these relationships, so that the casual contributor has at least one valid reference that passes the Wikipedia "notability rule". So what I am thinking of, is a specific mechanism whereby this is possible for other types of heritage, not just monuments. If people want to upload whole books, that's fine, but uploading abstracts could be good too, if they have the proper open license, etc, etc. I was thinking myself of oil paintings. There is already a list of paintings by Rembrandt, or a list from a museum, and theoretically, one could conceive of articles per painting. The point is that creating articles is too difficult for casual contributors, and a more or less standard format for this would enable people to flesh out article stubs without too much harassment from the current "new articles creation process". Jane023 (talk) 22:22, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Interesting idea!

Hi Jane, I think this is a really interesting idea! I wonder if you would test the contest framework by piloting it on one or more contests, to learn what works and doesn't work along the way, before setup of the replicable elements? Would you do some interviews or looking across other contests large and small across the movement to see what best practices have been developed already? I am curious to hear more, would love to see this built this into a complete IEGrant proposal...let me know if I can help. Siko (WMF) (talk) 06:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Siko, thanks for your vote of confidence, but sadly, I lack the skills to work this idea out into a proposal by myself. All help is welcome! For one thing, I don't know if a separate server is needed to keep and track all the list data, or if this is something that can be done on Wikidata for free. I am currently working on the dataset of the BBC's "Your paintings" website that Magnus Manske was so kind to dump onto the English Wikipedia. It's a fascinating list of painters from 1200 up to the present day. I want to pitch my idea of an biographical article writing contest for these artists to the PCF, and since I need to be able to track the articles coming in, I was thinking of the way WLM does this for monuments. Unfortunately, I am no expert on how this data is kept at the Toolserver and have no idea how to write a bot. I now have the data in spreadsheets and am trying to manage it by birth period and country of birth, as most Wikipedia contributors are interested in local artists and certain art movements. I like your idea of testing the framework, but any test will of course be in production, as we have no "test Wikipedia". The most work is creating a valid list. Anyone who creates articles regularly on Wikipedia knows that spelling of the title can be very tricky. For example, the list of artists includes many people of the same name, and how you differentiate them is important: "John Doe the Elder", "John Doe the Younger", "John Doe (painter)" or "John Doe (artist)"? The mechanism I had in mind would be something in the form of this tool, again thanks to Magnus. I would like to flesh this out with one reference (from the list), and proper categories (art movement, country of birth). Jane023 (talk) 15:06, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea too. I think it is very healthy to take advantage of images to incase other content and to trigger not only the production of images but the production of a better documentation about a topic. I think thematic approach (such as heritage) can work nicely in a transversal way. I do think that heritage as a topic is though not necessary particularly exciting for people; it is more exciting for institutions (heritage is a very political topic). Maybe to focus more specifically on something (i.e. WWI The first World War, animals represented in architecture, or railway stations or aviation, or the exceptional nature of cultural heritage - the largest, the tallest, the hottest...) can more easily trigger a community not necessarily interested in the architectural object or its role in heritage, but also on the topics represented or on the historical reference of that object. The reason why i suggest it, it's because I am not sure we do have a wide community of people really interested in heritage (Wiki Loves Monuments I think worked also for the traveling and going around nature of the contest). --iopensa (talk) 10:30, 4 July 2014 (UTC)