Grants talk:IdeaLab/Old maps in Commons need curation

Comments from Verdy p

I absolutely don't see what the AOMC category really offers except being an unsorted collection for all locations of the world (and at various epochs spanning several milleniums that are not comparable at all).

Really we don't need that, and we should only focus on appropriately creating and feeding the "Old maps of XXX" (and checking that they can fit there, i.e. at least 70 years old, because "old" also means that copyright is ended).

AOMC will not help to this task. But what can help us is a lot to cealrly separate what is old (but not necessarily completely obsolete) from what is recent in history.

But for that we must avoid mixing geopolitical entities when they are in fact different (for example a former Kingdom that was split in several parts, see for example the Luxembourg, split between 4 countries today: Belgium, France, Germany and the current Duchy)

For countries that have complex histories, it requires some good expertize to perform the classification and checking all relevant subcategories to mlake sure they don't span categories in fact intended for other parts today. To do that, we should make sure that categories are orthogonal where expected. But the transitivity of subcategories make this task difficult because we cannot include "exceptions" in categories (we can do that in Wikidata using qualifiers, for example exceptions by start/end dates). Unfortunately MediaWiki categoties are not enough expressive, less flexible than Wikidata elements which offers more precise rules.

For this reason, we should first check the rules of containment géographical or by time or regime or topic) in Wikidata. Tools of Wikidata will create a more solid data model and then with the links from Wikidata to Commons categories or wikipedia articles, we can fix these wikis. For now we've done almost only the reverse (but from multple wikis that have contradicting rules for containments of topic, notably for geopolitical topics described very differently depending on the language edition, see for example how Crimea is described between the Ukrainian WP and the Russian WP, and how it's hard to find a neutral point of view on other editions, but neutrality is required in Commons, and in Wikidata so there we have to allow multiple hierarchies, but clearly distinguished to avoid contradictions between the different POV that can coexist...)

So yes Old maps in Commons need curation, but this is not new. And curation is in fact needed almost everywhere in Wikimedia projects: it will be a never-ending task. But we should have better tools to check the data (there are now excellent tools in Wikidata that can help us in all other projects linked to Wikidata). I just hope that Wikidata will be better integrated in all other wikis (and notably with their category systems). verdy_p (talk) 22:47, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

April 12 Proposal Deadline: Is your project ready for funding?

The deadline for Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) submissions this round is April 12th, 2016. If you’ve developed your idea into a project that would benefit from funding, consider applying!

To apply, you must (1) create a draft request using the “Expand into an Individual Engagement Grant” button on your idea page, (2) complete the proposal entirely, filling in all empty fields, and (3) change the status from "draft" to "proposed." As soon as you’re ready, you should begin to invite any communities affected by your project to provide feedback on your proposal talk page.

If you have any questions about IEG or would like support in developing your proposal, we're hosting a few proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts:

• April 5th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC
• April 8th 1:00 - 2:00 UTC
• April 12th 16:00 - 17:00 UTC

I'm also happy to set up an individual session. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 00:38, 2 April 2016 (UTC)