Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New Zealand/heritage

Initial thoughts on content and process
One decision we will need to make is whether to produce the lists via Listeria and put them live on article space as is, or whether to do a middle ground of producing them in user space and then copying the resulting table across to article space. There are pros and cons to both of course (not least that I don't know if Listeria lists are accepted in article space anywhere on wikipedia yet, although the discussions I've seen rejecting them date from 2016 and prior).

The only reason I suggest we consider this approach (and note I'm not advocating that we do it, only that we think about whether it is better or not) is that it allows better formatting of the results in a more standard way. For instance, although I'm still learning to use Listeria, it seems a relatively blunt tool. There may not be options about formatting dates, for example, and I'm not sure about how to stop it putting language labels on the street address and trying to link other columns (like the category of heritage listing). The options available are here and are relatively few.

However, producing Listeria pages in user space and copying them across would also take considerably more editor time both in the beginning and in maintenance, the lists on Wiki would no longer be live, so still potentially get out of date, and whoever copies the tables across when a change happens will have to reformat again, and also take account of any changes that might have been made to the Wikipedia page in the meantime. We may prefer to accept less-than-perfect tables in article space in preference to tables that get out of date (...but how often do these lists change, really? Listeria updates every 24 hours but presumably does not generate a watchlist alert unless something changes).

Regarding items that get delisted by Heritage NZ. We don't delete those from Wikidata, I presume we just add an end date qualifier on the P1435 (heritage designation) and a P576 for demolished or destroyed items, which would make it possible to have a separate Listeria of those items if we wished (would we still want them on the main lists for the relevant area? we'll need to consider how we model it on Wikidata to reflect that). Is there an example delisted item I can look at?

Also to note that I don't think our Wikidata items are 100% consistent in how we model place (location Dunedin vs location Dunedin City, for instance) so there will be some work to get that sort of thing up to scratch after the initial list generation. I had to add location of Hokitika to several items before our list matched the German one. DrThneed (talk) 20:52, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Great thoughts. My preference is for less-than-perfect over hardcoded tables that become out of date. Christchurch can offer dozens of delisted items (thanks, Gerry!), e.g. Wharetiki House. And yes, there will be heaps of Wikidata work needed before we have clean lists. Most change to the lists that I expect is for photos and Commons categories to be added.  Schwede 66  23:27, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
 * So that was instructive - delisted buildings Listeria here - I've learned that Listeria ignores deprecated statements, so you have to search for items with an NZH identifier and a demolished statement. Which begs the question if anything ever gets de-listed for a reason other than demolition/fire/development ie it wouldn't have a P576 statement? DrThneed (talk) 03:41, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Further thoughts. I've just learnt about the TABernacle tool which creates live tables through Sparql queries, which gives you a way to both see missing data and edit it for a list of items without having to visit the Wikidata page of every single item. This seems a perfect tool for cleaning up our data before we then create Listeriabot pages for Wikipedia. I'll create a couple of samples and link them here. DrThneed (talk) 01:21, 6 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Dunedin heritage buildings (revised query where address filter is disabled) Tabernacle — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2404:130:0:20:0:0:1:1 (talk) 07:47, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Compared to Listeriabot table
 * Compared to German Wikipedia page


 * Christchurch heritage buildings in Christchurch City (not Christchurch) Tabernacle — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ratso56 (talk • contribs) 08:01, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Oooh thank you, was so focused on the shiny tools I hadn't realised I had limited it like that.DrThneed (talk) 08:31, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Street address
Needing a bit of a hand from a Wikidata wizard.

The List is available for download from the Heritage New Zealand website. The spreadsheet has a number of fields and one of the quirk is that for the address field, the place name appears in all caps in the string. When the Wikidata set was created, the address information was in many (most?) cases used for the description field. It's therefore not just a simple matter of shifting the description field to the street address field, but the all caps situation should also be attended to. And we couldn't just shift the description field anyway as in many case, the correct details are shown there.

What I've done is downloaded the spreadsheet and converted the all caps to the appropriate case. From here, what is the simplest way of getting the address fields into Wikidata? I can make my spreadsheet available (of course) but suspect I need a bit of a helping hand with setting up the next step.  Schwede 66  08:37, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I can do this, I've been meaning to do this for a while. I was going to do the case conversion myself but if you've already done it, that would be really helpful! --Canley (talk) 09:39, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Awesome. Here's a link to my spreadsheet; column T has the clean address line. I'm happy to work on this, too. Let me know how you go about this and how I can assist.  Schwede 66  18:39, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , great to see Canley has this in hand. We need to show you OpenRefine in Hokitika, it doesn't take long to learn but enables you to deal with these sorts of case conversions and uploading mass edits to Wikidata easily. DrThneed (talk) 22:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Progress comment
Thanks for kicking this off again. We now have pages for Southland District, Hokitika, Buller District and Grey District. In making them we have discovered our preference for putting live Listeria queries on enWiki is irrelevant as we are prevented from doing so (if you try, the Listeria code gets stripped out and a nasty little "there is no consensus for this" template applied, although the table remains). Listeria remains useful for creating tables but the maintenance after that becomes manual.

Seems a good time to discuss some of your questions re dividing up the lists, what we include etc. If we follow the German model, I would separate out the Greymouth listings from everything else in the Grey district, and Reefton and Westport would also have their own pages (but leaving only four remaining items in the district, which seems....not great?)

1. Which topics should be covered in the columns?
 * I notice I didn't include the heritage list number, is that useful? German lists include date of listing too but I'm not sure about whether we should.

2. Which headings should be displayed?

3. Should some of the columns be optional?
 * Which ones and why? I like having a standard format but if there are reasons to vary it for some areas, what would they be?

4. Should the list always show the first image listed in Wikidata?
 * This is the default through Listeria but you could change it after producing the table easily enough.

5. Some items have articles. Other items are notable but don't have articles. Many listings won't be notable. How do we decide whether to include a redlink for a notable but missing article? 6. Is the English label always suitable as the item's description?
 * There is the item label and the description as two different columns. The item label is the same as the name in HPNZ but it isn't always useful (e.g. see a number of "house" items in Buller district). But in combination with the decription it should be OK? If it isn't that's probably because the English description should be improved (e.g. many are the street address rather than a e.g. "heritage-listed church in Greymouth, New Zealand"). But you can change after producing the table if you are hesitant about changing the description I guess. I haven't worked through Buller tidying those up yet.

7. Do we show street address?
 * I think it is useful in case people want to find these things and they are called something different on a map.

8. Do we provide a link for coordinates?
 * Or even a map?

9. Do we provide start and end dates for the item?
 * We have inception dates for when things were built (if we know them). I didn't include end dates as the majority of items don't have one, so it would mostly be an empty column.

10. How do we deal with items that no longer exist?
 * I took the lead from your Southland list and put those items separately in text before the table. I assume we would take a similar approach to any items that are delisted even if they still exist (if that ever happens). Might need a table of delisted items for places with a lot, like Chch.

11. Should we use a date format that is easy to read, e.g. DD MMM YYYY?
 * Probably, we were stuck with Listeria format before but not now. Is there a tool I can use to change these easily?

12. Do we link through to the Commons category (if there is one)?

13. How do we display the listing type?

DrThneed (talk) 20:57, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Good questions. The very next step for me is to get into OpenRefine. What do I install? Version 3.4.1; with or without embedded Java?  Schwede 66  21:33, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * , I have no idea about the Java sorry (I'm on a Mac so there wasn't any option about that, Java was just included), and yes I'm using 3.4.1 The documentation is here if you need it to get things working
 * https://docs.openrefine.org/ DrThneed (talk) 23:54, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

First image listed in Wikidata
DrThneed Yes, that's useful. There's a Wikidata tool available called rearrange values that one can add to one's common.js page (e.g. mine is at User:Schwede66/common.js). This allows you to rearrange items in Wikidata if there is more than one. Very handy tool and once you've got it, it means that you can shift the preferred image into the first spot. That should resolve this particular question.  Schwede 66  23:22, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * , ah now I need to find something with multiple items I can reorder.... DrThneed (talk) 23:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * So I think we should include the heritage number seeing as when you do it with Listeria it automatically links to the heritage listing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DrThneed/Westland_district
 * I haven't published that page yet and will hold off on any others until we decide on some of policy points (e.g. what default sort order? I see mine are a bit random - I'm leaning towards alphabetical by location?) so there are fewer to redo. DrThneed (talk) 01:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * That would also overcome my concern about lack of referencing. Let’s do that!  Schwede 66  08:40, 30 March 2021 (UTC)