Commons:Monuments database in Russia

What is it all about?

Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) and Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) are annual photography competitions dedicated to natural monuments (protected areas) and cultural heritage. They play crucial role in acquiring new photos for Wikimedia Commons and increasing the coverage across various Wikimedia projects. This page explains the general workflow for the photos uploaded during the WLE and WLM competitions in Russia.

Lists of monuments

Both WLE and WLM rely on the extensive monument lists:

Lists of natural sites (about 20 000 entries)
Lists of cultural heritage (about 226 000 entries as of 2025)

These lists are hosted at Russian Wikivoyage and help the participants in finding the right objects that should be shooted. The lists also help organizers in sorting and maintaining these photos via a system of automated tools.

While some countries feature properly maintained official lists of monuments, the situation in Russia is far more complex, especially for the cultural heritage with its multiple, sometimes inconsistent protection categories and the poorly organized government registry, which is notorious for its duplicate entries and other errors. Our lists of monuments developed over the last 10+ years with contributions from hundreds of volunteers are by far the most comprehensive database of Russian cultural heritage. They are actively used by heritage enthusiasts and even by government agencies who sometimes add WLM photos from Wikimedia Commons to their official papers (sadly, without proper attribution).

How is it organized?

Here, on Commons, individual photos and categories are labeled with templates:

{{Protected Area Russia}} for natural sites
{{Cultural Heritage Russia}} for cultural heritage

These templates take only one parameter, monument ID, which is based on the respective lists of natural sites and cultural heritage. The information about the monument, including its name, location, and geographical coordinates can be retrieved using this ID. Additionally, the lists contain metadata, such as Wikidata IDs that facilitate the connection to Wikimedia projects.

Categories and their place on Commons

Each photo can be placed into categories of three types:

Categories of individual objects. Named categories of individual objects cannot be created automatically and must be manually crafted by our volunteers. It is a very slow process that lags behind the upload of new photos. These categories should be linked to Wikidata ID's via the standard tools: P373 at Wikidata and {{Wikidata infobox}} at Commons.
Generic categories. Category trees 'Cultural heritage monuments in XX' / 'Protected areas of XX' for individual regions, districts, and cities contain photos of those objects that do not have their own category yet. Otherwise, they contain categories of the first group as subcategories.
Technical categories (galleries) are assigned and created automatically. These categories are named 'Russian heritage ID XX' or 'Protected areas of Russia/XX' and serve as containers for all photos uploaded for a monument with a given ID. These categories should be neither edited manually nor linked to Wikidata. They are required for using a number of standard Commons tools including API (for bots and gadgets) and Cat-a-lot tool (for humans) when sorting and organizing images. Such categories are especially valuable for our volunteers who create and maintain the categories of the first group. You can read more about the technical categories here. If you feel that such a technical category should be linked a category of the first group, you can do it using the {{See also cat}} template.

Graphical summary (for cultural heritage):

Remember: our database of Russian cultural heritage includes hundreds of thousands of monuments and their photos. It strongly relies on automated tools for image search and categorization. Changes in templates disrupt this operation and transform the systematically organized database into a mess of photos scattered over various, hard-to-find categories. Please, do not make changes in templates and technical categories without prior discussion.

No FoP in Russia

"There is no FoP for modern sculptures in Russia" is something that we hear way too often. When you see a photo of a Russian monument and want to nominate it for deletion, consider the following:

Most of these photos may be perfectly fine when uploaded under fair use to Wikivoyage, certain Wikipedias, and other Wikimedia projects
Many of these photos are already used by one or more Wikimedia projects
Useful photos may be lost if Commons users do not inform other projects when photos are deleted

If you nominate a photo for deletion, please inform us. We will organize the file transfer while the deletion discussion takes place.

Frequently asked questions

Why use the 10-digit monument ID's instead of the 15-digit ID's currently assigned by the Russian government agency of cultural heritage?

As of 2025, the official registry of Russian cultural heritage contains less than 160 000 entries and omits a huge portion of monuments that are legally protected as cultural heritage. This official registry is full of inconsistencies and mistakes. Moreover, it is often unavailable from outside Russia because of the various internet restrictions imposed by the government. The monument ID's in this registry may change in an unpredictable manner. Assigning an independent 10-digit ID to each monument serves two goals: covering the 65 000+ monuments missing from the official registry, and ensuring a sustainable system that would not depend on the quirks and bureaucracy of the Russian government. These 10-digit ID's are not self-invented. They stem from the older government registry that serve as the core of our database. You can read more about it here (in Russian).
Regarding the natural monuments, no official registry exists as of 2025. It leaves our lists the only comprehensive source of information on the protected natural areas in Russia.

Why create the monument lists instead of using Wikidata?

Historically, our monument lists preceded Wikidata. Their organization reflects the general workflow of Wikimedia projects where all editors can contribute their knowledge without technical understanding and skills, which would be required for editing Wikidata. We progressively synchronize our lists with Wikidata by creating individual Wikidata items and updating existing items with properties related to Russian cultural heritage: P1483, P1435, P5381. However, it is work in progress, and it will always be, as our database grows continuously. The Wikidata entries are used for tools like Monumental and Commons app, but many other tools, including ErfgoedBot and our automatic image categorization system, rely on the lists of monuments and the corresponding monument ID's. The category system at Commons is not fully integrated with Wikidata either, hence the organization of monuments into lists with independent monument ID's remains necessary for the time being and in the foreseeable future.
You can read more about our monument lists and Wikidata here (in Russian)

Why create technical categories ("galleries") that duplicate standard Commons categories for a given monument?

At first glance, these galleries may seem redundant, but in fact they are not:

some of our monuments have been photographed hundreds of times; for example, Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg is a popular tourist destination. Its category has grown so big that it has to be split into several subcategories. Assigning the corresponding ID 7810514003 to a photo is not equivalent to placing this photo into Category:Winter Palace. The photo should be typically placed into a subcategory of Category:Winter Palace. On the other hand, the technical category Category:Russian heritage ID 7810514003 contains all these photos at the same time. Therefore, Category:Winter Palace and Category:Russian heritage ID 7810514003 have different content. This difference is especially tangible in the case of bots, but also for humans, especially when using the Cat-a-lot tool for mass-changing the categories.
some of our monuments are designated as ensembles, namely, different parts of the large monument, such as towers, walls, and churches of a monastery, have their own ID's. This structure does not always follow the logic of Commons categories. For example, old graves at the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra are designated as individual monuments, but at this stage it seems impractical to create individual (named) Commons categories for each grave.
galleries allow easy access to all photos uploaded for a monument with a given ID; a standard (named) Commons category will often contain other photos too, including those unrelated to cultural heritage

All in all, the technical categories simplify image search for human users as well as bots. With almost 400 000 photos of Russian cultural heritage on Wikimedia Commons, their organization is by all means not easy. The technical categories usefully augment the standard category trees at Commons. They are hidden by default and do not interfere with the regular named categories of individual monuments.

What are the automatic tools that require technical categories?

API is the method-of-choice for an automatic processing in Wikimedia projects. Since Commons is based on categories, its API also works with categories. This feature is used in several gadgets that are needed for a smooth operation of the cultural heritage lists and, eventually, for the successful upload of new photos. These gadgets include:

voy:ru:Mediawiki:Gadget-CulturalHeritageImagesCount.js counts the number of images uploaded for a given monument and displays it in the list. This gives readers a simple overview of those monuments that require more photos
voy:ru:Mediawiki:Gadget-CulturalHeritageHighlightMissingImage.js uses the same image count to highlight those monuments where photos are available but none of them has been added to the list. Our volunteers will choose the best photo, which will eventually appear in the Wikidata element of this monument as well
voy:ru:Mediawiki:Gadget-CulturalHeritageListingEditor.js creates a simple interface for editing our structured lists of monuments that eventually provide information for Wikidata. One part of this tool is the built-in gallery that allows editors to directly choose the photo of a monument and add it in one click. This functionality is especially helpful for new users who can be engaged in simple editing of Wikimedia projects. Each year 60-70% of the WLM participants (that is, 250-400 people depending on the year) are newly registered users

Additionally, our bots do various maintenance tasks at Commons and need up-to-date lists of monuments with a given ID. Running these requests via API is the most efficient way of retrieving necessary information without overloading the servers.

How do users benefit from technical categories?

Each editor has their own workflow, and it is impossible to document them all. However, we know for sure that dozens of editors use the technical categories on a daily basis. One typical usage example is creating the named category for a given monument. Once the category is created (this can only be done manually, because a suitable English name and the parent categories should be chosen), it can be easily populated by running Cat-a-lot from the technical category.

Contacts

Additional activity is coordinated on Russian Wikivoyage, where you can find exhaustive discussions about lists of monuments and the strategies of image categorization. If you know Russian, you can read these discussions first. If you can't read Russian, feel free to ask questions:

Alexander (please, reach me in other projects)
Yaroslav