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Book Chapter

Hunting for Lost Heritage on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Un workflow per scovare i monumenti italiani

  • Marco Chemello

A lot of content has been produced with crowdsourcing by Wikimedia users, not only on Wikipedia. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of cultural heritage were uploaded in the last 20 years and are available on Wikimedia Commons, still not linked to structured data on Wikidata, often of unknown historical buildings, like ruined churches in Southern Italy. We will demonstrate that is possible to use data mining techniques on Wikimedia projects and build on Wikidata a more comprehensive open catalogue of Cultural heritage in Italy from crowdsourced contents. We will present the result of phase 1 and 2 of this project, where OpenRefine was used to create thousands of new items on Wikidata about "lost heritage" in Italy, and discuss of the possible use of AI to speed-up the process.

  • Keywords:
  • Wikimedia,
  • Wikimedia Commons,
  • Wikidata,
  • churches,
  • crowdsourcing,
  • AI,
  • cultural and historical heritage,
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Marco Chemello

Wikimedia Italia, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-7446-8800

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  2. Azizifard, N., et al. 2022. “Wiki Loves Monuments: Crowdsourcing the Collective Image of the Worldwide Built Heritage.” ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 16 (1). <10.1145/3569092>.
  3. Chemello, M. 2025. Hunting for Lost Heritage on Wikimedia [presentation slides]. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hunting_for_lost_heritage_on_Wikimedia.pdf>.
  4. Ćwik, N. 2024. “A New Initiative Aims to Protect Endangered Heritage Using Crowdsourcing.” Diff blog, 25 marzo 2024. <https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/03/25/a-new-initiative-aims-to-protect-endangered-heritage/>.
  5. Grossi, P. G. 2024. “Nuove regole sulle riproduzioni dei beni culturali: saremo più libere e liberi di usarle?” Arkivia, Wikimedia Italia, 18 aprile 2024. <https://www.wikimedia.it/news/nuove-regole-sulle-riproduzioni-dei-beni-culturali-saremo-piu-libere-e-liberi-di-usarle/>.
  6. Guinness World Records. 2012. “Largest Photography Competition.” <https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-photography-competition>.
  7. Heritage Guard Network. 2025. “Heritage Guard Network.” Meta-Wiki, rev. febbraio 2025. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Guard_Network>.
  8. Meta Wikimedia. s.d. “PetScan.” Meta-Wiki. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PetScan/en>.
  9. Ministero della Cultura. 2023. Decreto ministeriale 11 aprile 2023, n. 161 – Linee guida per l’acquisizione, la circolazione e il riuso delle riproduzioni dei beni culturali. <https://www.beniculturali.it/mibac/multimedia/MiC/documents/2023/04/18/DM_161_2023.pdf>.
  10. Ministero della Cultura. 2024. Decreto ministeriale 21 marzo 2024, n. 108 – Modifiche al DM 161/2023. <https://www.beniculturali.it/mibac/multimedia/MiC/documents/2024/03/25/DM_108_2024.pdf>.
  11. OpenRefine. 2024. “Reconciling.” OpenRefine Manual v. 3.8, 20 dicembre 2024. <https://openrefine.org/docs/manual/reconciling>.
  12. Wiki Loves Monuments Italia. 2025. “Progetto Wiki Loves Monuments Italia: storia e statistiche.” Wikipedia/Wikimedia Italia. <https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_Italia/Storia_e_statistiche>.
  13. Wikimedia Deutschland. 2025. “Wikidata: Embedding Project.” Wikidata, aprile 2025. <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Embedding_Project>.
PDF
  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Pages: 239-248
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Hunting for Lost Heritage on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Un workflow per scovare i monumenti italiani

Authors

Marco Chemello

Language

Italian

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2.29

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Wikidata e la ricerca. Condividere esperienze / Wikidata and Research. Sharing Experiences

Book Subtitle

Atti del Convegno, Firenze, 5-6 giugno 2025 / Conference proceedings, Florence, 5-6 June 2025

Editors

Elena Marangoni, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

378

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-1009-6

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-1010-2

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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