Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australian historic places/Archive 2

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Archive 1 Archive 2

Heritage listing texts

I've noticed on several articles a section called "Heritage listing" that has been copy-pasted directly from the NSW Heritage Register record for that building/place. These have ben inserted by user:Rangasyd.

While the content is accurate, and freely-licensed, and [mostly] appropriate for Wikipedia, my concern is this is is not improving the articles: in many cases the articles are already fairly good and by copy-pasting the heritage listing information merely duplicates information that's already elsewhere in the article. Moreover.... it's just not a good idea to bulk import prose and sub-heading formatting from a third-party project with different purposes and needs. Wikipedia articles SHOULD link and discuss the heritage status of buildings, but it doesn't need the ENTIRE heritage designation text. That would be more appropriate for Wikisource as an original document.

See for example:

I think new facts and nuances should be integrated into the article, not merely 'dumped' into a new subsection. For example, there are currently 40 articles which include the following phrase copied directly from the heritage register:

"Note: There are incomplete details for a number of items listed in NSW. The Heritage Division intends to develop or upgrade statements of significance and other information for these items as resources become available"

I don't think that it's appropriate to repeatedly copy into WP all this stuff into existing articles. For articles that don't exist yet, I can see the benefit of course (e.g. Paragon Cafe, Katoomba - relevant diff was started by just such an import).

I would like people's opinion about this approach.

[This is different from the lists of heritage-listed buildings that are inside the jurisdiction of the item - even though in some cases they might deserve to be broken off into a standalone list article in my opinion (e.g. The Rocks, New South Wales#Heritage listings and Sydney central business district#Heritage listings. ]

Wittylama 11:24, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

A similar issue appears with Queensland articles, in Category:Articles incorporating text from the Queensland Heritage Register. Kerry Raymond may care to comment, as the editor who inserted at least some of the relevant text. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:14, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
Related categories, from Category:Wikipedia articles by source of incorporated text:
Mitch Ames (talk) 12:18, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

utilising heritage material for articles

I believe this discussion should be at the Australian main noticeboard as this project is one which never really went through any process to be incorporated into the evaluation and assessment system that all other Australia projects are part of, and really is a 'ghost' project in that there is literally no level of assessment or evaluation possible.

Also the utlisation of material from sources external is problematic, in that there are parts of material used that really are WP:NOT in the context and sense of not being part of a normal wikipedia article,or what is expected in one. Discussion at this point would be more likely productive if held at the Australian noticeboard. imho.

Also identifying specific editors as to ranges of articles relevant to this discussion is really quite unnecessary, it is the broader principles at stake that are more important. If those named so far wish to be involved, it is their perogative. In the end, it is the broader issue that is more relevant - as to whether there should be more formalised assessment instituted to make it a specific project in the Australian project ambit; and as to how material in the registers is to be utilised or not. JarrahTree 12:32, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

These heritage articles and their structure were discussed over a number of months back in 2014-ish at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board in parallel with my building the generator that created the Wikipedia articles from the Queensland Heritage Register entries (having spent the previous year negotiating with the relevant Qld Govt department to release under a CC-BY licence. The structure of the articles and what should and shouldn't be included was discussed at some length (Mitch Ames was definitely a contributer with his encyclopedic knowledge of the MoS). I was generating draft articles as part of the process so people were able to see exactly what actual examples of what the articles would like (straight from the generator). And, as I have said throughout the process, we need to have a human in the loop to "polish" the article that is emitted from the generator, as machines are not perfect at this kind of task. Due to the archiving at that discussion board, it may take a little while to find the discussion which was split over some time as I worked on the generator over some months. But there was no secret this was happening and the structure of the articles reflects the consensus that was established at that time. The New South Wales State Heritage Register articles followed the same Wikipedia article structure, but I would note that NSW SHR does tend to include a lot more verbose text for reasons for heritage listing and has a habit of including introductory remarks that are pretty much a long summary (sometimes it looks like they copied and pasted) of the individual heritage criteria commentary. I tend to strip out such duplication when I see it, but that's a manual process when the article is uploaded, not an automated one. Of course there can be commentary in a heritage entry that is not appropriate for Wikipedia and the "Note: There are incomplete details for a number of items listed in NSW ..." that Wittylama noticed falls into that category. We do not need to know about the internal workings of the state heritage department. The other thing some of the NSW SHR entries do is include commentary on how the site on all the heritage criteria including the ones it does not meet. To be heritage-listed they usually only have to satisfy one criteria (but most satify a number of criteria) but it is not relevant IMHO to the Wikipedia article to discuss the ones they don't meet (again that's the internal workings of the department). Those should be stripped out manually. The value of the heritage register criteria commentary is that it explains why this site is worthy of being heritage-listed which is the basis of their Wikipedia notability of topics (a point that came up in the original discussions). To remove them entirely would lose that, but there is no reason they cannot be trimmed if they are repetitive, discussing the internal workings of the heritage process, or non-encyclopedic in other ways etc. It is difficult to be prescriptive as the original heritage entries vary enormously from minimal to lengthy. But that's down to an article-by-article consensus as there is large variation between the original heritage entires in this regard (some contain little information, others lots, some are clearly written, some are not). There have also been discussions on this list about some of the differences between the NSW SHR structure and the QHR structure, as the original entries have different sections in the different states that had to be taken into account, but these are more at the detail level than the larger structuring level. So, I can confirm that the structure of these article is the result of Wikipedia's consensus process, that all articles were uploaded by a human contributor (not bots) who had the opportunity to polish the article, that they all have a hidden category that reveals they were created from that process (unless someone else has subsequently removed it) and of course all articles remain open to change by the normal consensus builing on their Talk pages and this has occurred from time to time in the usual way. If there is something frequently problematic like the "There are incomplete details", then if these are pointed out, it is usually relatively straightforward to find the articles using AutoWikiBrowser and fix them. If there are widespread issues, let us know here and those of us involved are happy to discuss/fix them or if not widespread, raise it on individual article talk pages. Kerry (talk) 13:35, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
Because of the way archived discussions can be archived at different times, I can point quickly to a couple of discussions quickly but there were definitely a lot more. I think this was the kick-off point and [1] this is where we started into detailed discussion with 3 randomly chosen examples. Kerry (talk) 13:54, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
More discussions of a broader nature: [2] possibly the earliest?, [3] looking at other heritage registers. Kerry (talk) 14:07, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
As noted above, there have been a bunch of discussions about this over the years and our content about heritage topics has been improved immeasurably by the use of CC-BY content: the difference between our coverage of heritage sites in NSW vs somewhere like SA that has no such available content is day and night. This material was never intended to be any kind of fixed or unchangeable and editors have always been welcome to hack at CC-BY content and improve it for our purposes. It's unclear what the problem people have is with a lot of this stuff: for instance, Wittylama drew attention to Strathfield railway station as some kind of bad thing, despite the fact that the NSWSHR material is the reason we've got half the current history section as well as any information at all about the physical historic structures on the site. If it's just the "heritage listing" sections that are being complained about, that's a completely different conversation to out-of-nowhere wholesale whining about the addition of tons of excellent content. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:24, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
To be clear, I do not take issue with new articles which are created using this process of carefully crafting prose from free-licensed heritage-listings (of the kind I recall you demoing at the USyd conference a few months back, Kerry!). My comment/concern is about when people copy-paste the entire heritage-listing text, into a new sub-heading of an existing article, without concern to integrate it or for what content is already there: see the 5 examples I put in bullet points above (and others, listed at [4].) Wittylama 14:09, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
I think that this (if it is just about the "heritage listings" section isn't an unreasonable position, and I've never been completely comfortable due with that material due to its often very subjective language - although it frequently is the section that most clearly highlights why the place is actually important. One thought I've had over the years is converting the lot of them to "significance" sections that could discuss the importance of the sites in prose by quoting multiple sources (or at least using a lot more editorial discretion), which I feel would have a much better end result and get rid of the issues being raised here about that specific SHR content. Another alternative where there isn't huge amounts of material might just be to delete them and plonk anything significant not mentioned elsewhere as a brief couple of quotes in the lede. The practical problem with doing something about it is that a) my suggestion requires quite a bit of editorial work, and b) simply trashing the sections in many, many articles functionally removes clear articulation about why the site is significant. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:29, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

I too see the use of copied material as problematic and potentially WP:NOT. I am trying to initiate discussion on the future of the St Johns Anglican Church Precinct entry on Talk:St Johns Anglican Church Precinct#Future_of_this_page. I see an immediate need to replace the generated text with a link to the NSW O&EH site. If you have a view please contribute to the discussion.Fj42 (talk) 01:37, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Already responded there, but absolutely not. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:24, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Just dumping text is a concern and should be avoided, the method Kerry has created works sufficiently to create articles, though my concern is if we pick all the easy fruit ie state listed heritage places what do we have left to bring new users into the community. Yes I know thats also a double edged sword as people expect us to have the covered and are equally disappointed if they arent there. What I do find is new people are initially reluctant to rewrite existing material, especially those with a higher education background. Gnangarra 07:59, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

We've been at Australian Wikipedia topics for 16 years and "not having content" has unfortunately done bugger all to recruit new editors into heritage topics. The only notable recruitment effort that did anything was the hardcore local one in Fremantle/Toodyay and, as we've discussed before, half of the topics they wrote weren't heritage-listed and wouldn't have been affected if CC-BY content existed for WA and had been used. Any kind of actual effort to get more than the same handful of editors who've been doing this for at least the last half a decade is a bigger conversation that needs a better solution than just intentionally not covering stuff. (Though I will note I've specifically avoided using this method for unfilled topics in WA like heritage post offices which are on the CHL because I can't be bothered with the likely arguments.) The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:38, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Understand that, those arguments are too tiring to waste energy on. Not trying to start one here just noting the Kerrys method is our best solution and its works. There might be room in the process to make expansions post creation easier so as keep something there for new people to sink their teeth into. I watching this with more interest since hearing how its works in Sydney and I've been exploring the potential for a project here with a GLAMy to bring some of its publications to CC-by-SA then do the same process. Gnangarra 13:24, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Seeing that no one has made any comment, or seen in any way anything of value that resembles something like an evaluation system, such as if the Historic Places was either a task force or an actual separate project, I fail to see any long term benefit of adding CC material to the Australian project. The lack of some form of evaluation scheme leaves the larger Australian project at risk of having some eager beaver editor downloading vast amounts of content, with no provision for evaluating the usage or the actual content and its relative importance to the project, or having a guideline by which dumps might be evaluated by importance or quality.

I do not think massive CC dumps - either by volume or quantity should be quarantined from some form of evaluation.

Although some editors seem to completely ignore the evaluation systems or even deny that they exists - the majority of projects on wikipedia have, as a guideline - assessment schemes such as -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Assessment#Quality_scale and important schemes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Assessment#Importance_scale.

If the editors who are keen to fill the Australian project with CC material in relation to heritage or other forms of significance or importance in the Australian landscape, then it would be very interesting to see explanations as to why and how so far such material is evaluation free. JarrahTree 04:15, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

The point I just made on your talk page is that the CC-BY material generally passes those evaluations with flying colours: the states in which we've used CC-BY content have greater breadth, depth and quality of coverage than those that don't (with the exception of the two or three towns in WA with geographic-specific projects which surpassed them in at least breadth). If they're assessed against any objective scale (which these are as likely to be considering Wikipedia's extraordinarily spotty assessment systems), they've got more in-depth histories, better descriptions of what's physically there, and better descriptions of why they're significant than the vast majority of user-created content, even if the material could often still be improved. The only argument against it is "I don't like it", which is not a quality argument, and not one that evaluation is going to change anyone's viewpoint on. Bringing up importance of articles is odd considering that all of the CC-BY projects have used an objective, Wikipedia notability-accepted standard for importance, which you have specifically fought very hard against in the past, advocating using a much lower bar for articles in your geographic areas of interest (which I don't object to, but which makes this particular stance very odd). The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:14, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Flying colours is not a metric, if historic places had an assessment system separate from the actual state projects system - there is the capacity for importance and quality to be evaluated. As for many of the comments you make, I fail to see the relevance to the issue. It is very simple, even if at first pass all the items that exclusively utilise the cc source were given the same status of quality and importance, it would in the larger scheme of things fit better than as it is. As your comments range over a number of topics which could be answered at length, I will leave it at that for the purpose of this specific project. JarrahTree 09:58, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Let me rephrase it then: it is absolutely unclear what purpose such an assessment system would serve, why we would do it, and how it would improve the encyclopedia. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:38, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
My experience is limited to the recent upload of St Johns Anglican Church Precinct. The article was uploaded from the SHR Entry for the site. I think such articles would benefit from evaluation. The SHR entry is full of un-referenced opinion and is largely sourced from a Conservation Management Plan (CMP) finalised in 2004. For those not familiar with CMPs, they are commissioned reports, usually prepared by an heritage architect in which the architect expresses his/her opinions and formulates recommendations for the conservation of the site. They contain useful references and a lot of opinion.Fj42 (talk) 05:19, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
One thing this handful of minority perspectives have in common is that it all seems to amount to "I don't like CC-BY content being used" - if you try to pin them down to what, specifically, they have a problem with, or work to address anything they do have a problem with, it's met with utter crickets. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:35, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
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