Education/News/October 2018/What to write for Wikipedia about? Monuments!

What to write for Wikipedia about? Monuments!

Author: Martin Urbanec

Summary: Map of Monuments is a new tool allowing Wikipedians to find monuments with no article on Wikipedia. It is available for monuments located in Czechia and Austria. If you have questions, know about bugs or want to see new features, contact me at martin.urbanecwikimedia.cz.

Recently a tool called Map of Monuments was created. This tool is created to help Wikipedians with writing articles about monuments, that doesn't have article on Wikipedia yet.

The tool is based on existing lists of monuments that already exist in Wikipedia and maintained by Wikipedians. Those lists look like this one (Czech). There is one big advantage – those lists are daily processed by a bot into a form that can be processed by other bots, tools etc. easily. Based on those pieces of information, Map of Monuments is daily updated.

Map of Monuments allow you to filter monuments by their name. If you're interested in churches, you can enter "church" (in a supported language, see below). You can do something similar to it to filter another monuments. You can also zoom-in to certain region and get only monuments located in that region.

Map of Monuments displays monument name in language used in country the monument is located in and links to Wikipedia in that language.

As of October 2018, Map of Monuments is available for monuments in Czechia and Austria. If you want to use it in your country or country you're interested in, please let me know at martin.urbanecwikimedia.cz, and I'll look into data available and add support for your country if possible.

Map of Monuments is useful for editathons, contests but also for other wiki activities. It also can be used by individual wikipedians as inspiration what to write about.

Please don't forget that even it is probable the article actually doesn't exist, it is possible the monument is described in article with a slightly different name than the on which is linked from the list of monuments. If that's the case, you can create a redirect. During next run, it should disappear from Map of Monuments automatically.

If you find a bug in Map of Monuments (or if you want to request new feature), please let me know via my e-mail martin.urbanecwikimedia.cz or by filling a task in Wikimedia Phabricator.

Tags: wikipedia, writing articles