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Help us turn the pins blue!

This post applies to the WLM UK interactive map – ie the campaigns in Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland.

Help WLM contestants get the feedback they are looking for – turn the pins on the WLM-UK map from red to blue.

On the interactive map, monuments that aren’t yet on Wikidata show as a red pin. You can help those pins turn blue as contestants upload pictures of ‘missing’ monuments. It doesn’t happen automatically, as manual checking is needed to make sure the image uploaded is actually suitable to be used as the primary Wikidata illustration.

To help, login to Magnus Manske’s newly-updated Wikidata File Candidates tool and make sure that the COMMONS and ON WIKIDATA options are selected.

Type in the Commons category you want to check, eg Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 United Kingdom. Use the cog button to show/hide options, and the refresh button beneath to run the query.

If there are any candidate images to be added to Wikidata, they’ll appear in a list. On the left are Wikidata items and on the right are the potential candidates. First, make sure the correct WD item has been matched by the tool. If not, remove the line item by clicking the red button on the left.

Then, to add a new primary WD click on ‘Image’. You should normally select only a single best and most representative picture, but you can select several if really essential. If there is a good representative internal shot, add that as well using the ‘Image of Interior’ option from the Photo button.

Click on the red cross on the left to tell the tool that you won’t be using the other images of that monument (this prevents those images being re-displayed to you later). If there is no suitable representative image at all, ignore the suggestions and just click the red cross.

Sometimes the WD item already has one or more images, in which case they will appear under a horizontal red line in the left column. That may be because the WD item has been changed since the tool did its last data-collection run, or because the existing image is, for example, an internal shot and the tool is presenting possible options for an additional representative image.

Once you’ve added one or more images to WD, the corresponding pin on the WLM-UK interactive map will change from red to blue within a few minutes.

Many thanks to  Magnus for this wonderful tool!