Hack4OpenGLAM/ClimateChange+Heritage

This is a page to gather all of the resources, thoughts, etc... needed for the hacking session.

Title: Mapping the impacts of climate change on UNESCO World Heritage sites using IPCC open data + Wikimedia tools

Description

Have you ever wondered what cultural heritage might disappear or be endangered as a result of climate change? The IPCC published an open data Atlas that helps us understand the regional impacts of climate change. With the information that we have from the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list and from the Wikimedia ecosystem, we want to overlay the data from both institutions to identify areas where cultural heritage might be at most risk due to impacts of climate change. The output is to create a visualization that overlays this information and uses the information, the data and images from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons & Wiki Loves Monuments. We have a set of SPARQL queries to start playing with, and we will be cleaning some of the data on Wikidata.

Volunteer activities

Below is a list of how you can voluntarily contribute to the project if you are interested.

Communications & design

• Translate this page to multiple languages.
• Help us design visuals to communicate in social media channels.
• Help us design a nice map and a visualization layer for the map.

Coding

• Create a page with a basic web map
• Add a base map that has the appropriate layers of IPCC data
• Fetch heritage site data from Wikidata, and render it on the map
• Have a toggle switch: 1) heritage data from UNESCO, and 2) heritage data from Wiki Loves Monuments

Wikidata & data wizardy

• Go through and look for duplications in the entries from the queries.
• Clean up the data and make sure that all the locations have images associated with them. You can do this through PetScan.
• Make sure that the coordinates (altitude & latitude) of the photos on Wikimedia commons are accurate.
• Make sure that all the interwiki links for each of the Wikidata items are connected to the Wikidata items! (i.e. if you know that the monument is on your language Wikipedia but you don’t see it on Wikidata, connect them).

Wikimedia Commons

Wiki Loves Monuments is bigger than the World Heritage UNESCO sites, but lots of these photos don’t have coordinates. Here’s how you can help:

• add coordinates
• create a wikidata item
• connect the wikidata item with the photo on Commons
• add depicts statements for the photos that don’t have them

Wikipedia editing

• Create articles in your language for the monuments & cultural heritage sites that don’t have an article yet in your language!
• If there’s already an article for it, try to add information about environmental conflicts or impacts of climate change around the cultural heritage site.
• Capture the risk for those monuments by adding a paragraph, a header, section or some other type of tag that includes the words “climate change” or “environmental conflict”. Do not forget to add references! Below are some examples:
  • The Colombian coffee growing axis is a cultural heritage landscape by UNESCO that is very much at risk due to climate change. For example, this is documented in this journal article, but in a quick search we’ve found more. You could write a section or a paragraph on climate change impact to that cultural heritage landscape.
  • The Kaeng Krachan National Park is a park in Thailand that was presented as a UNESCO cultural heritage site in two opportunities before finally being declared a World Heritage Site in 2021, despite concerns by the OHCHR. I went through and added a sentence on that, but it could be further expanded.
  • There are many other cultural heritage sites waiting for this!