Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in the United Kingdom/Eligible subjects

This is the page for discussing the heritage subjects that will be eligible to be photographed

Broadening the list of eligible subjects this year

Last year (mainly due to time and resource constraints) we focused on grade I and II* listed buildings, and equivalents. Shall we go broader this year? The following English Heritage lists have been suggested on the mailing list:

• Listed parks & gardens,
• Listed battlefields
• Listed wrecks
• Structures on the 'At Risk' register

--MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:08, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps the National Historic Ships Register? See http://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/search_the_registers.php?action=region. There are 300 ships in the National Fleet, and another 1,000 in the National Register. They may move around occasionally, but they are registered at a specific place, which is where they spend most of their time. Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (talk) 15:15, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Grade II listed buildings?

If we wish to add import into our systems all the grade II listed buildings, that will increase the number of records by a factor of at least 10, to over half a million. There are several problems with that:

• The vast majority of grade II buildings are of essentially zero photographic interest, and will never be notable on any Wikipedia. Not only are the exteriors of most not particularly photogenic, but in many cases the feature that is listed is internal (such as the staircase) and is not visible to a photographer. It is doubtful if it is worth the effort of importing such a huge number of records most of which will in all probability never be used.
• There will be a large increase in scripting work needed, but more critically a huge increase in the volunteer effort needed to do manual cleanup of the data (none of the official lists are very clean), and to do categorisation. Even if we can find the volunteers, would it be a good use of their time to work on cleanups of records that are of minimal importance to the Wikimedia projects?
• Will the communities of Wikidata/Commons/English Wikipedia accept more than half a million new records of this type?
• Based on what they told me last year, English Heritage is likely to be put off sponsoring the contest if we encourage photographers to take photos of residential grade II buildings. Although of course there is no legal bar to anyone taking a picture from the street, EH had negative reactions from residents in the past when they got involved in the 2001-08 Images of England project, and they will be sensitive to this.

Although the proportion of grade II structures of interest is small, the absolute numbers are still quite significant, and it would be a shame if we decided again that we could not accept photos of any of them. If we decide not to import the whole list, however, we would need to find some way of accepting grade II entries bearing in mind that the competitor will have no easy way to find and enter the official listing number. Options could include:

• The entrant has to look up the official number manually and type it in for the entry to be accepted. Hard work for the entrants.
• The entrant has to provide some appropriate level of categorisation (to be discussed), so as to make the image useful to Commons. Volunteers can then look up the building number later, if need be, perhaps only doing that if the photo reaches the later stages of judging.
• The entrant isn't forced to provide any detail apart from typing in building name/place, leaving the Commons categorisation to volunteers. This could require a lot of work, as we can expect that many images will be poorly named and thus may not be very useful until someone has done the categorisation.

There may be other options. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:28, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

The first option sounds like it could work, the English Heritage site offers a map search. The map search allows you to easily find the IDs by clicking the listed buildings on the map. --Lewis Hulbert (talk) 15:38, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

• Adding Grade II lists would be an exceptional amount of work. We only narrowly managed to get the Grade I/II* lists up in time last year; we'd save some time this year due to not re-inventing the wheel, but as you say almost all of it is the actual cleanup. I must have spent 20+ hours on this, and there were others who did much more. The lists would be unwieldy, and have to be broken down to civil parish or lower - we found that the Grade I/II* lists were already impractical for "normal" administrative units in many cases - which is again a hassle.

In general, I also agree with the other concerns - I raised the presumption of non-public status last year - but I think the logistics are a deal-breaker in any case; at least for the way WLM currently runs (big lists on Wikipedia). Andrew Gray (talk) 22:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Non-built heritage?

There have been some suggestions that we might include non-built heritage, including public art and natural landscape features. While these are worthy subjects in their own right it seems to me that they would be best made the focus of separate and different competitions such as Wiki Loves Public Art or Wiki Loves Earth. We might well run such competitions in the UK in the future, if enough volunteers step forward, but for the moment I doubt we have sufficient resources to run more than one big photo competition in 2014. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:39, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

In particular, natural heritage is distinct from built heritage and would be a better fit for Wiki Loves Earth (which takes place in April/May). Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 14:42, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Scheduled Monuments

After Listed Buildings, Scheduled Monuments seem the most obvious choice, partly because they are what most people would recognise as monuments, but also because of the numbers involved. Some figures from Wales (Cadw) - mainly because this is an area I've been working on:

• Listed Buildings - approx 30,000 (roughly 600 Grade I. I haven't been able to split Grade II* and Grade II figures yet)
• Scheduled Monuments - about 4,000
• Protected Wrecks - 6
• Historic Landscapes - 58
• World Heritage Sites - 3
• Historic Parks and Gardens - about 400
• Registered Battlefields - none

I would guess that the figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland would be similar (with the exception of Registered Battlefields).

For England, the number of Scheduled Monuments is about 20,000. There are 43 Registered Battlefields.

A back of the envelope extrapolation (assuming Northern Ireland and Scotland have similar figures to Wales, and that England's figures would be 5 to 10 times that of Wales) gives:

• 4,000 - 6,500 possible subjects if all heritage lists (excluding Scheduled Monuments and listed buildings) are eligible
• 32,000 possible subjects for Scheduled Monuments if eligible (less extrapolation here as the figure for England is known)

BTW there are now lists of Scheduled Monuments for Wales on Wikipedia (split into lists for unitary authorities, with further subdivisions by period and/or historic county where necessary to keep the lists to a manageable size). Most of these lists do not yet have many images.

I've only found a few lists of Scheduled Monuments by English county (Cheshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire), and some lists by town or city. It would be great to have lists covering all of the UK.

Robevans123 (talk) 11:38, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I would support including scheduled monuments, although for some there is not much to photograph. I don't think there are many lists and I have resisted creating one for Somerset in case there was a specific format created from EH records, but we do have extensive numbers with articles see from the category structure starting at Category:Scheduled Ancient Monuments.Rodw (talk) 19:25, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

England's lists for scheduled monuments are (with some notable exceptions) few and far between. Aside from those Rodw and Rob have already mentioned there's one for South Yorkshire, and one for the City of Leicester. I think that may even be all of them, though there isn't a single category for these lists so it's difficult to be sure without going through by hand.

RobinLeicester has done sterling work for Wales, setting the bar for the rest of the UK. There are over 8,000 scheduled monuments in Scotland though a quick search hasn't turned up any lists for them on Wikipedia.

It's worth noting that there aren't any scheduled monuments in Northern Ireland as the legislation doesn't apply there. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:06, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Is this correct? I think there was different (but similar) legislation/orders for NI. The Northern Ireland Environment Agency's website (http://www.doeni.gov.uk/niea/built-home/protection.htm) says there are "185 single, groups or complexes of sites and monuments" (classed as State Care Monuments), and roughly 1800 "sites dating from 7000 BC to the 20th century, such as prehistoric tombs, earthworks of all kinds, castles churches, maritime sites, canals, World War 2 defences and the Belfast Shipyard ‘Samson and Goliath’ cranes" (classed as Scheduled Monuments). The criteria for selection and level of legal protection for these sites seem quite similar to that for England, Scotland, and Wales. Robevans123 (talk) 19:15, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Seems not. I noticed the legislation which covers England, Wales, and Scotland explicitly excluded Northern Ireland. I didn't then think to check if there was separate legislation, and there is. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:29, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

World Heritage Sites

There are 27 in the UK. However, including the list may be unnecessary because the buildings will be the highest level of listed building or a scheduled monument, while it has been suggested above that natural heritage may be outside the scope of WLM. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:34, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Summary

So we have a summary of what we've discussed:

• Wrecks – yes
• Scheduled monuments – yes
• 'Heritage at Risk register' sites – essentially redundant to Grade I listed buildings?
• Grade II listed buildings – probably not
• Natural heritage – no
• World Heritage Sites – redundant?

This is just my reading, so if you feel I misjudged a discussion feel free to change the list above. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:21, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Removing Protected Wrecks

I have removed Protected Wrecks following a brief discussion on the WLM-UK mailing list. They significantly complicate what we need to do (including needing special competition rules and warnings). Apart perhaps from the Mary Rose which is in a museum it's highly unlikely that anyone will be able to photograph any of them given the need for both diving qualifications and official licences to dive on them. It's just not worth it. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:24, 16 August 2014 (UTC)