Commons:Monuments database in Russia

What is it all about?

Each country has long lists of protected natural sites and cultural heritage. They are central to popular photography competitions Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments that are organized every year by the Wikimedia movement. The lists of natural sites and cultural heritage monuments in Russia are maintained by the team of local organizers who also take care of the photos uploaded during these contests.

On the Russian-language Wikivoyage, there are:

How is it organized?

Individual photos and categories are labeled with templates:

{{Protected Area Russia}} for natural sites
{{Cultural Heritage Russia}} for cultural heritage

These templates take one parameter, monument ID, which is based on the lists of natural sites and cultural heritage. The information about the monument, including its name, location, and geographical coordinates can be obtained using the monument ID. Additionally, the lists contain metadata, such as Wikidata IDs that facilitate connection to Wikimedia projects.

Categories and their place on Commons

Each photo is placed into categories of three types:

Categories of individual objects. Categories of individual objects cannot be created automatically and must be manually crafted by our volunteers. This is a very slow process that lags behind the upload of new photos.
Generic categories Cultural heritage monuments in / Protected areas of. They remain in a somewhat untidy state because no uniform naming of Russian cities and districts is used on Commons.
Categories by ID are automatically added by templates and adopt simple names Category:WLM/ID and Category:WLE/ID for cultural heritage and natural sites, respectively. These categories should be redirected to a named category (e.g. Category:WLM/1010021052 to Category:Threshing barn from Berezovaya Selga]]) as soon as one is created. Such categories are linked from Russian Wikivoyage's lists of natural sites and cultural heritage under the name "галерея". These numbered categories are useful for sorting images and finding images with a given ID.

Do's and don'ts

You can help by doing the following:

Add Commons categories to Wikidata items using the property P373
Add {{Wikidata Infobox}} to those categories
Rename categories of Russian cities and districts as to make them standard and easily recognizable for bots (and don't forget to update category names on Wikidata!)

Please 'never modify {{Protected Area Russia}} and {{Cultural Heritage Russia}} without first discussing the proposed changes.

Remember: it's a huge database, and it's a huge effort to organize it. But this database is fragile.

No FoP in Russia

"There is no FoP for modern sculptures in Russia" is something that we hear way too often. When you see a photo of a Russian monument and want to nominate it for deletion, consider the following:

Most of these photos may be perfectly fine when uploaded under fair use to Wikivoyage, certain Wikipedias, and other projects
Many of these photos are used by one or more Wikimedia projects
Useful photos may be lost if Commons users do not inform other projects when photos are deleted

If you nominate a photo for deletion, please inform us. We will organize the file transfer while the deletion discussion takes place.

Contacts

Additional activity is coordinated on Russian Wikivoyage, where you can find exhaustive discussions about lists of monuments and the strategies of image categorization. If you know Russian, you can read these discussions first. If you can't read Russian, feel free to ask questions:

Alexander (I won't see your ping here; please, reach me in other projects)
Yaroslav