Wiki Loves Monuments

data.wikilovesmonuments.it is a visualization platform designed for Wikimedia Italia. The project is built around Wiki Loves Monuments Italy (WLM), a contest that fosters the Wikimedia Community to depict and share photographs of monuments on Wikimedia Commons, under an open license. Thanks to the visualization, it is possible to explore Italian territories and display the photographic coverage of cultural properties over different time frames. By doing so, Wikimedia staff and volunteers can address the community’s effort and organize photographic or mapping activities.

The visualization deals with more than 130.000 cultural properties. For each of them we harvest a number of different details, like the creation date on Wikidata, the date in which it was put in contest, the relevant images, and all the images created thanks to the contest. By combining such information, we reconstruct the history of monuments statuses, and, through data aggregation, we show coverage over territories. We have two types of statuses, that we called “WLM status” and “Commons status”. The first describes monuments from the point of view of the contest: they can be “photographed” (at least one time), put “in contest”, or simply “on Wikidata”. The logic of the second status doesn’t take the contest into account: a monument is “photographed” if we retrieved at least one picture from Commons, otherwise is just “on Wikidata”.

The project employs a custom visual model based on a data-driven fan, leveraging slices to display the history of aggregated monuments statuses. In the visualization we generate a fan for each for Italian administrative areas in the view (i.e., regions, provinces, and municipalities) to see progresses over days, months, or years. In addition, we added a secondary exploration mode based on a list, suitable to access and download data about individual monuments. The current version of the project (alpha 0.2) is publicly accessible at data.wikilovesmonuments.it.