User talk:Multichill/Archives/2019/July

Bot created articles

I've started a discussion at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Civil parish bot to create articles on missing civil parishes, because you did the Scottish listed buildings and you have done various bot created articles I'm wondering what you think and if you have any advice, thanks. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:18, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

photos wanted tags for monuments

Hi Multichill, i am happy you keep contributing in Wikipedia/commons, etc.! Hey, I have been musing about how to improve/collect/request photos for historic places articles, esp. for the U.S. National Register of Historic Places articles, but also for any other series covered in Wikipedia Loves Monuments, etc.

There are many articles and/or list-article items which have one pic already, and would probably not appear to need a pic, when in fact more/better/different pics would really be very much wanted/helpful. This includes:

• historic district topics where there are 350 contributing buildings in the district, but only a pic of one building is provided. I have created numerous such articles.
• articles where a specific feature of the building or site is noteworthy, and/or is the main reason for the historic registry listing, but that feature is not covered in the available photo. For one example, in Aztec Motor Company Building which I just created, I mention the signage on the side of the building, not visible in the photo of just the front of the building.
• articles where the available photo is objectively "bad" and could easily be improved:
  • e.g., when the photo is taken at dusk because a Wikipedia photographer/editor like me couldn't get there earlier, like some that I have contributed
  • e.g., when better perspective could have been found, e.g. the photo is apparently taken from a moving vehicle so is blurry, or it is clearly taken from a car at a low perspective that tends to highlight garbage cans in front of the building and/or otherwise does not show the topic well, because the photographer didn't have time to get out and walk around .... Or when there are trees obscuring the view, while it is pretty clear that a photographer could have gotten closer and taken an unobstructed or less-obstructed photo, still from public accessible road or sidewalks, etc. I could provide examples.
  • e.g., when only a portion of the listed building can be seen from public access, like only the chimney or roof can be seen because the building is behind a hill, or when little can be seen using telephoto across a river or lake.
  • e.g., when the listed building cannot be seen at all from public access, and someone has provided a photo of not-the-listed-building, e.g. they have taken a picture of a non-contributing gate or driveway leading toward the listed building. While it would be great/better if someone could get permission to go on the property and take pics of the actual historic resources (which takes effort and planning, but which I and others have sometimes done)
  • e.g., when the listed building has been demolished, and someone has provided a photo of an empty lot, which is sort of helpful but not completely so. Once notable always notable: the building was described in documents and historic pics could/should be found and uploaded instead. In fact for many/most NRHP-listed buildings that later got demolished, it is probably okay to make a copyright argument that a historic photo (almost always available in NRHP docs) is okay to be included in the article, at least in the English language wikipedia, even if it is not okay at Commons.

I meant to say where there is likely a fair use argument that a photo can be used. Which applies probably for most cases where a listed building has been demolished, and so a new photo is not likely to become available, and where probably no agency involved would have much reason to object to an old photo from NRHP nomination being used with fair use argument. There are many of these cases, and these are a pretty substantial and rising percentage of the "missing photo" cases for NRHP listings. Note that U.S. National Park Service and perhaps other nations' listing agencies are slow to remove listed status for places, so technically many demolished buildings are still listed though they should be removed eventually. The U.S. NRHP lists continue to hold these until they are officially removed (and then we move them to a "formerly listed" section on the county list-article page), and we still want/need pics for them. WikiProject NRHP keeps track of these, imperfectly but fairly extensively, in our system of notes at wp:NRIS info issues. --Doncram (talk) 20:33, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I wonder about using some template in the article to indicate photo status, or in the list-article, or at the article talk-page. And if the Wikipedia Loves Monuments system could recognize these, and suggest to participants that we really would like new photos to be contributed? Cheers, --Doncram (talk) 00:15, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@Doncram: that sure is an interesting problem I have been thinking about before. When we started Wiki Loves Monuments a large percentage of the listings weren't illustrated. The main goal was to get a photo. For some country (not only the USA, the Netherlands too) we get to the point that we have a large percentage of the listings are illustrated and we want to improve quality.

Keeping track of what has a photo or not is easy, it's just yes or no. Keeping track of what needs to be improved is harder. You already list several good reasons. How to store these and where? Some options:

• Wikipedia in the lists or in articles - It's local and a bit hard to find. Not very structured data
• Commons on existing images - Also not easy to find. Not fun to have your photo tagged like this. With multiple photos, where to put it? Not structured, doesn't really scale?
• Wikidata on the item about the listing - That might actually be the most scalable way. We would have figure out how to model at and get some new properties. The infobox on Wikipedia and the photos on Commons could list a note based on the statement on Wikidata requesting a photo. It's structured so we can easily query it, create maps and include it in tools like Monumental.

So maybe the Wikidata option is worth exploring. Would make sense to design it in a way it scales to other countries and other domains. This would be the more structured version of Wikipedia:Requested pictures I guess? What do you think? Multichill (talk) 11:55, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata is probably the easiest, with a bot notification on some talk page that the image on Wikidata has been changed.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:33, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for replies. Yeah I have thot about this for a while too. There are some more categories/reasons that can be identified fairly objectively, i think, too. Another category is archeaological sites where the address is restricted and, while some may know where the site is and be willing to post photos identifying it (and perhaps helping vandals find their way to loot the site), what is more clearly beneficial and non-damaging is photos of museum artifacts from archeological study of the site, without showing location of site.

I agree that most contributors would not like to have their individual photo labelled as inadequate in some way, and that is a factor in wanting to use some assessment at the level of the historic site instead. And whether a site is adequately illustrated is not a function of any one photo usually. Sometimes one general perspective photo does serve quite well and I have seen it argued that frequently there is just one decent perspective available, due to line of sight issues, whatever. But more often multiple photos are needed for good coverage, especially for covering details that are mentioned as important in the significance of a site, e.g. the quality of the brickwork or whatever, or architectural details, or relationship of one contributing building to a contributing structure on the site, etc. And maybe a photo at dusk does add to the completeness of coverage of a site, even though full sun views might be more clear and might be better if you could only choose one. So I do think that assessing adequacy of coverage overall, and identifying/requesting specific views or types of photos that would complement the existing coverage, in a forward-looking way, would be best.

This is more and more a problem. Already two or three years ago the photographers/editors in Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon asked whether there were photos wanted anymore in the state, before/during the Wikipedia Loves Monuments campaign, and I found myself saying that actually most coverable places (besides archeological sites) have one pic already, but more would be appreciated for many sites already having a pic. But I think that few Oregon editors did anything that year, and consensus seemed to be that no/few pics were wanted, despite apparent interest/willingness of photographers to participate. (That 2017 discussion was archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon/Archive 27#Wiki Loves Monuments. One aspect interesting to me there, was the fact that Wikipedia Loves Monument map system is limited to show photos needed only where coordinates are known, and doesn't cover the address-restricted places for which library/museum/local historian type contributions are wanted.)

I do believe that the {{reqphoto}} system on Talk pages, e.g. at Talk:Church Avenue-Lovers Lane Historic District which i just created, is not currently adequate. It does allow for specification of unique specific requests, e.g. the documentation gives example "It is requested that a photograph of the main entrance be included in this article to improve its quality." But this is not communicated usefully to anywhere (would not be conveyed in a Wikipedia Loves Monuments campaign), and this system doesn't have the multiple categories/types of photos wanted. It would be useful to know and convey, at site level and at various aggregate levels like counties, what is the number of fair-use photos of demolished buildings wanted, what is the expected number of photos of different buildings in historic districts wanted, what is the number of difficult-to-collect photos (e.g. requiring site owner permission to go onto the property) wanted, etc. The identification of wants/needs should be done at the individual site level article I think, not in the county list-articles, because this is a mature-level type of request system, requiring more knowledge about each specific site.

For the U.S. NRHP system, I would want the supporting wp:NRHPPROGRESS page to be able to tally the numbers of photos wanted at least, and perhaps some other statistics, at each geographic level. The programming of that system does already tally some info from the individual article pages (i.e. whether there is an "NRIS-only" tag or not) into its county and state level tabulations. It could perhaps be modified to tally info from a Talk page template, i am not sure. (By the way, the wp:NRHPPROGRESS system is pretty great, support statistic-wise, and I run its maintenance update tool every day or week or so, but refinements/changes have not been much supported there, and the original programmer is no longer active (and in fact promised to stay inactive until i personally die or something). I suspect a more general version of it could be useful for supporting other nations' historic site listing systems, too, but I am not sure whether the current programmer(s) supporting it would be interested in doing more and whether others can be recruited, and I am not sure if the NRHPPROGRESS programming is too difficult to maintain or expand or what, technically.)

So I think an expansion/modification of the reqphoto template on Talk pages, or a different template to be included in the mainspace article page, would be the way to go ideally. _If_ this info can be captured somehow in the Wikipedia Loves Monuments systems, e.g. if something can be displayed in the U.S. county list-articles' "upload pic" features. I am kind of biased against WikiData, in that I don't want to go to wikidata to edit to there to put in any photo request (i hate how some Women-In-Red article request pages seem to require regular editors like me to go to Wikidata), but perhaps Wikidata system could be used somehow to collect info from the mainspace pages and reflect it back in some useful way for Wikipedia Loves Monuments or whatever.

Multichill, if there were a template on each historic site article page (or corresponding talk page) identifying numbers and types of photos wanted, do you see your way to including some indications into the corresponding list-article pages? E.g. maybe display of one number and some color coding, conveying something about how much/what type of pics wanted, which would be clickable and go to more specific requests? --Doncram (talk) 20:33, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

2008 photo featuring the elevator entrance built 2001-02, on rear of building

Thinking about it, having just a simple indicator of how many photos are really needed to provide a minimally acceptable treatment, would go a long way. A supplemental number, of the number of photos specifically wanted to enhance coverage, would also help. Example: Air Science building in New Mexico. I would really like to indicate somehow that a photo of the historic 1907 front facade, designed by Trost & Trost, is needed. The front survives, is available to be photographed. It happens, often, that a photographer focused on the wrong thing, being relatively ill-informed about what was actually needed. I could provide more examples, e.g. of photos centering on the one modern intrusion, a non-contributing building, amidst a row of contributing buildings in a historic district. For Air Science, one photo of the front facade would suffice; no extra detail photos are really necessary, for this one. For some historic districts, a supplemental number of 12 or 20 or so would indicate how many buildings are specifically identified as vital/key buildings in the district, out of 100 or 300 or however many contributing buildings, for which photos are wanted to enhance coverage, and those could be listed with addresses at the Talk page or within some photo request template. It would be great if these one or two numbers could be provided to potential photo contributors. --Doncram (talk) 22:24, 31 July 2019 (UTC)