Hi Ilario, On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Ilario Valdelli <valde...@gmail.com> wrote: > The real problem is that all these lists are heterogeneous and don't have a > single identifier valid for all of them and there could be the risk to have > duplicates.
This is an issue that at least Germany is dealing with as well. > For this reason WM IT is working around a *new* system of single identifier > to have all these lists in a single repository and to avoid any problems > connected with duplicates. I strongly recommend to stay away from creating own identifiers from scratch! The issues that come along with it are much bigger and more difficult to resolve than not having unique identifiers! I know from last year that it seems tempting at first, but this is why it's not a good idea at all: 1st and most important: It's nothing but original research. It's perfectly fine to make up internal IDs for the database (you will have to do that, see below), but once those internal IDs show up on either Wikipedia or Commons, it's a violation of the "No Original Research" policy. Since the ID-system has to/should be the same over all Wikipedias, it doesn't even help if the it-community would be OK with it. 2nd: With own IDs, you lose the ability to compare your data with the official lists. 3rd: With that, you're moving away from the authorities instead of moving towards more cooperation, establishing yet another system for numbering monuments. So what do I suggest you do instead? As I said, we're facing a similar (if not worse) situation in Germany. We have literally more than one thousand institutions and authorities that issue monument lists for areas ranging from single municipalities to whole states (in total, there are about 1 million monuments). Many of them do assign numbers, but they all start with 1, so we have the issue that the IDs are not unique. What we're going to do now that we have enough lists on Wikipedia: We will use an already existing numbering scheme called the Gemeindekennziffer which assings a unique code to each municipality as a prefix to the official IDs. (The actual system is a little more difficult, in fact, the Gemeindekennziffer is structured into different parts, for example the first to numbers tell you what state the municipality is in and so on. Therefore we'll just use the first two numbers of the code as the prefix for states that have unique IDs already.) This way, the IDs on Wikipedia and on Commons stay the official ones, only inside the database we add a prefix which is not OR but based on an official numbering scheme. I'm sure that you can find a similar numbering system for Italy! For areas without any IDs in the lists, User:Wiegels has come up with some great ideas. For example, he is able to match uploaded images with list entries through temporarily created internal IDs. If you're interested in "our" solutions, I'll be more than happy to introduce you to Wiegels and to make sure that the prefix-System we're implementing with Maarten's help will be usable for Italy and possibly other nations as well. Best regards, Kilian _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu
