Solutions from Ukraine: volunteers create comprehensive catalog of Ukrainian cultural heritage

Volunteers have collected and published the most complete open list of objects of cultural heritage of Ukraine. The photo contest "Wiki Loves Monuments" has reached over 100,000 featured sights.

Wikimedia Ukraine reported this.

What is the problem?

Many countries have official lists of cultural monuments that are open for anyone to access. However, there has never been a comprehensive list of Ukrainian monuments at all levels, and the State Register of Immovable Monuments is incomplete. To view it, one must download PDF documents, and the "yePamiatka" system is still in the process of becoming fully functional.

"Wiki Loves Monuments" is the largest international photo contest that takes place in more than 40 countries around the world. Since its inception in 2010, more than 3.1 million photos have been uploaded.

The project aims to collect photos of landmarks to illustrate Wikipedia articles and encourage people to study their history and culture.

What is the solution?

The photo contest in Ukraine has been held by the NGO "Wikimedia Ukraine" since 2012. During this time, more than 3,000 participants joined it.

For the first time in the history of Ukraine, through the efforts of volunteers, the complete public lists of objects of cultural heritage were collected and posted on Wikipedia, which just crossed the record mark of 100,000 – the "jubilee" landmark was the church of St. Matthew of the Bernardine monastery in the village of Leshniv, Lviv region. Now, this monument of the 17th century is in a state of disrepair.

Forming the most accurate list of cultural heritage objects is essential to documenting their condition through photos, videos, and studies and promoting their preservation. Especially now, when Ukrainian monuments are under threat of physical destruction due to a full-scale war, however, it is not easy for volunteers to form such a list, says Olha Krezub, a member of the project's organizing committee.

"Every year, we must send dozens of requests to local and central authorities. Then, we need to transfer the information to an electronic format and check the data (quite often, we find errors in addresses or even outdated data that do not match because there is no unified system). For example, there was a case when the Regional State Administration provided a list of monuments, and the city council replied that they had no monuments on the territory (although there were 22 monuments in the regional list); we even sent our data to the city council. And in 2015, we even sued Pokrovska Regional State Administration of the Dnipropetrovsk region for the list of objects because they were labeled "for official use."… Despite all the difficulties, now there are 100,000 monuments on the lists," comments Olha Krezub.

How does it work?

An essential aspect of working with monuments is free digital access to documents related to cultural heritage so that data (addresses, names, years, etc.) can be checked – various decrees, resolutions, and orders, for example, of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Culture, etc.

"Most of the documents we receive are in the form of scans, so adding memos from these documents requires additional work for text recognition. A separate campaign in Wikisource will help translate these scans into text format. For instance, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine issued Order No. 634 on November 16, 2023, allowing 411 archaeological sites to be added to the lists of the Luhansk region. Information about the "jubilee" monument, specifically the church in Leshniv, was obtained from Order No. 1023-0-5-20 issued by the Lviv Regional State Administration on November 13, 2020," says Anatoliy Honcharov, the initiator of the "Wiki loves monuments" contest.

Anyone interested can join the document digitization campaign "Wikis Loves Sights" until January 31. Contest page: http://wikisource.wlm.photo

For reference:

As reported by Rubryka, 872 cultural heritage objects were destroyed or damaged from February 24, 2022 to December 25, 2023. Of them, 120 are monuments of national significance, 682 are of local importance, and 70 are newly discovered.