Connected Open Heritage/FAQ

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How will this affect Wiki Loves Monuments and the tools currently in use?

We will not to cause any disruption to the running of the competition and the various tools which make use of the WLM database. By uploading the monuments data into Wikidata we allow countries to use Wikidata fed tools including Monumental and Wikidata lists to run Wiki Loves Monuments competitions.

If the community desires to retire the WLM database we could help out with that (e.g. make it so that the main tools make use of Wikidata instead, or possibly the database lives on as an endpoint but updated through Wikidata instead of from the lists). What happens will be a community decision.

How is the project funded?

The funding for the 2016-2017 project was an external grant of ca. $300,000 USD to Wikimedia Sverige from the Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery (PostkodLotteriets Kulturstiftelse). PostkodLotteriets Kulturstiftelse provides financial support to projects that work to “promote co-operation across boundaries, national as well as social and cultural, alternatively projects promoting public education on cultural heritage through cultural expressions and forms”. This does not mean that the Culture Foundation in any way control, or can demand, which information is added. As always the final say for what is included rests with the community.

The initiative launched in 2021 is part of Wikimedia Sverige's initiative to launch a Thematic hub for content partnerships.

Why change the Wiki Loves Monuments database?

While formulating the project we were in contact with previous WLM organisers regarding the biggest remaining problems and what would need to be done to address these. We have built the project around solving these issues. Moving the WLM data into Wikidata is not a new idea. In fact some countries have already pioneered this and have their WLM data on Wikidata.

Wikimedia Sverige has worked with related projects for many years but thanks to this large grant we are now able to take on challenges that previously would have been hard to tackle.

It’s an integral part of the project to work close to the community and carefully discuss any issues which arise and be transparent about any steps we are taking and of course incorporate feedback.

To state the obvious; we are doing this because we believe it will benefit Wikidata, WLM and the Wikimedia community as a whole.

Which additional countries will you add and why?

In addition to the countries identified during the pre-study (Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali and Georgia), we will work together with our partners to produce a list of candidate countries based on certain criteria. These criteria focus on:

How threatened the cultural heritage is in the country;
What data exists about the country’s cultural heritage;
How likely we are to be able to get access to the data through our partners;
How difficult it would be for a volunteer to get access to the same information.

What can I do to help?

Help us establish the mappings between the current WLM data and Wikidata properties/entities by participating in WikiProject WLM and WikiProject Cultural heritage.
Categorize and improve the metadata of the uploaded media and put these in a context by using them on Wikipedia.
Help us identify additional built heritage datasets we can import into Wikidata.
Tell us about organisations who want to share their built heritage photos, find out more here.
Spread the news about the project on social media and through other outlets.
Let us know about events and conferences (globally) where it would be good for the Wikimedia movement to be represented.
Participate in Wiki Loves Monuments by submitting your own photos.
Translate and localize material relevant to the project.