Remembering War Memorials

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Today is in the UK, when we remember our war dead.

In a discussion on Bluesky of AI slop in FindMyPast’s new database I have just been answering a question about how to record war memorials and the identities and stories of those listed on them, using free-to-write and free-to-read services, as open content and open, linked, data. It would perhaps be useful to record those answers here. Without using AI.

1. Photographs

A 'sea of poppies' on a stone memorial as big as a house, with banners to commemorate the memorial's centenary.
Take lots of photos—the whole memorial; each side; each panel or set of names (see the picture of my local Hamstead War Memorial, below); each sculptural element; the memorial from a distance, in its setting (like the picture of Brierley Hill memorial, above). A modern mobile phone is OK for this, if you don’t have a good camera. You may need to go back for a second visit, if one side is badly backlit and in deep shade.

Upload those photos to Wikimedia Commons, and create a category for the memorial if one does not already exist.

Transcribe the names as part of the description on Commons—this makes them searchable. If there are multiple shots in which a set of names are visible, you can transcribe for one and put a link to that from the others. See “Help Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons by transcribing small pieces of text” for guidance.

If the memorial is outside the UK, check the local law on Freedom of Panorama, in case the memorial is still in copyright, in which case skip this step.

Examples: Brierley Hill memorial on Commons; Hamstead memorial on Commons

2. WikiTree

Create a “space” page on WikiTree, the excellent free genealogy site (“space” is what they call any non-biographical page about a topic such as a memorial or cemetery; again, check first that one does not already exist).

The individual WikiTree pages of the people commemorated can then be linked to this, and vice versa, and you can create biographical pages for those commemorated, where none already exist.

Examples: Eyam memorial on WikiTree; Marsden memorial on WikiTree

Unlike most of the other sites mentioned here, WikiTree is not a Wikimedia Foundation project, but is run on similar lines, by its community of contributors.

3. Wikidata

Hamstead Memorial; follow link for transcription

After once again checking for an existing entry, create an new item on Wikidata for the memorial.

If any of the people on the memorial are notable in Wikidata terms, check for existing items (pages) and if none exist, create and populate them, and add them to the memorial’s item. Please try to include coordinates.

Examples: ; ;

4. OpenStreetMap

Check that the memorial is in OpenStreetMap (OSM), and if not, add it there. A simple node, or point, will usually suffice.

Examples: Brierley Hill memorial on OSM; Eyam memorial on OSM; Hamsted memorial on OSM

OSM is also not a Wikimedia Foundation project, but it too is run on similar lines by its community.

5. Join them together

Add the ID of the OSM node or way, the WikiTree “space” ID, and the Wikimedia Commons category name to the Wikidata item.

Add the Wikidata ID to the OSM object

Add the Wikidata ID to the WikiTree entry.

Add an image to the Wikidata item and WikiTree page.

Examples: see above.

6. Wikipedia

If the memorial is , consider writing an article about it there.

Example:

Conclusion

Not all of the examples above have all of the features I describe; they are works-in-progress.

If you can’t do all of the things I suggest, you can at least do some of them. All of the above sites are built by ordinary people like you, making modest but important contributions.

There is a small learning curve involved in editing each of the sites listed, but if you can use a word processor, or email software, you can quickly pick up what’s involved.

If you need help, or support, please ask—I’m happy to assist where I can, or to signpost you to local or online groups who will. You can leave a comment below, or find me on Bluesky or leave me a message on Wikipedia.

In memoriam

Remembering my relatives who fought in two world wars, especially and , who lost their lives.

Developer needed to make Wikidata’s geographical data compatible with GPS tools

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Wikidata needs an open-source developer to make its geographical query results compatible with GPS devices and other geo-spatial tools. Here’s why…

If you query Wikidata (the database sibling project of Wikipedia) for geographically locatable subjects (say, a list of accredited museums in the UK) the results are returned in a table.

When the data has coordinates, with a single click (on the left-hand menu, in desktop view) the results can also be displayed on a map.

The tabular data can be downloaded (via the right-hand menu) in a number of formats, such as CSV, HTML or JSON.

The Wikidata community would like users to be able also to export the data in one or more GPS-friendly formats. These are not only useful for GPS devices, but are compatible with other mapping and visualisation tools. I opened a ticket for this feature request—in 2019!

A patch to do this, supporting GPX, GeoJSON and KML, has been coded. However, it relies on a number of libraries, which in turn introduce numerous dependencies on other libraries. Because these libraries all need to be security-checked, and maintained, using the patch would be cost-prohibitive. As a result, it has been declined.

We are told that it should be possible to code the conversions directly, so that the libraries are not needed. Or to look at removing what we do not need from those libraries. This “requires a developer with a bit more understanding of the formats to look into it”.

I’m not a developer, and the nuts-and-bolts of this are mysterious to me.

We need someone with the relevant knowledge and experience, willing to work on an open-source fix, for the common good.

Who will step up and take on this pro-bono work?

Update: 18 June 2025—WDQS now offers GeoJSON downloads for results that include coordinates. KML & GPX should follow. See the ticket link, above, or try it for yourself here (works best on desktop; mouse over right-hand edge to get menu with download link).

Update2: 23 April 2026—Data can also be downloaded as GPX or KML (using the first column for name values).

How Proactively Publishing Publication Dates Could Help Facebook Fight Fake News

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A few days ago, during a period of severe flooding across many parts of England and Wales, caused by storms Ciara and Dennis, one of my friends shared this Financial Times story, UK makes last minute bid for EU flood funds, on Facebook:

FB1

Obviously, it was a timely item, and relevant to many of those affected. and clearly related to recent Brexit developments.

Or was it?

A mutual friend soon responded:

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As you can see, they pointed out that the story was actually four years old.

Facebook could prevent well-intentioned posts of such stale news from misleading people, and subtly discourage people from repeating them, by including the original publication date in their preview, something like this:

FB3

There are a number of ways they could obtain the publication date, such as from the shared page’s meta headers, and if no date is available they could even warn “no date specified, please check source”.

Of course, this won’t stop bad actors from publishing stories on web pages with deliberately misleading metadata, nor the inept from accidentally doing so, but Facebook are reportedly downgrading unreliable sources anyway, so that’s just another factor to add to their criteria.

And it’s not just Facebook, but Twitter and other social media services, that could do this.

Who Has the Keys to Your Online Treasure Chests?

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flickr logo

Flickr is a wonderful, cheap (or free!) way to store and serve images online. When you’ve used a Flickr account for several years, it becomes a rich repository of historic media — a veritable treasure chest.

I’ve been trying to help a client (who shall remain nameless, to spare their blushes — and to preserve my relationship with them) to recover access to their old corporate Flickr account.

It’s clearly branded as such, both in the name and logo, and is obviously so from the content.

It seems the staff member who set it up, and has long since left, did not register it with their corporate email address, but a personal one.

We’ve emailed them at a publicly-available address, to ask for their assistance, but they haven’t responded — I don’t know whether they left the organisation willingly, nor under what circumstances.

Flickr support say we can only recover it if we can tell them information only the account holder would know, such as:

  • Describe the contents of any private photos in the account.
  • Provide the names of any of the non-public albums in the account.
  • Provide the name any Private Groups the account is in.
  • List any third-party apps that have been authorized on the account (uploaders, social apps, etc).
  • If you used the FlickrMail system, please describe some of the conversations that you have had in there.
  • If you can recall back to when you had a paid account, please tell me the exact date and amount for some of the charges that you’ve gotten from us.

Of course, we can’t do that.

It looks like my client will never get back access to their account, and any non-public media locked in it. Fortunately, there is nothing there that is publicly viewable and embarrassing, though some of it is dated.

The best Flickr will offer, in the circumstances, is to make the whole account private.

A salutary lesson to the rest of you, to check who has “ownership” of not just organisations’ Flickr, but social media, cloud storage and similar accounts.

And do the same for all your domain names, too — in a past job, I found one that had been registered to a staff member’s spouse!

Charles N. Mavroyeni’s Hoopoe

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This curious plate, depicting a Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops), appeared in several early 20th century books. It’s by a photographer from Athens, Charles N. Mavroyeni, and is captioned as a photograph, but clearly includes much over-painted colour, by an uncredited hand.

Hoopoe

I’m trying to find out more about Mavroyeni — not least his date of death, to determine the copyright status of his work, and thus whether it can be used in Wikipedia.

I’ve compiled what little information I can find about Mavroyeni, into an item on Wikidata (a sister project of Wikipedia, that hosts linked, open data).

As well as ornithological subjects, he photographed insects and reptiles. One picture, published in the 23 June 1906 issue of ”Country-side: A Wildlife Magazine” (page 96), depicted a beetle in flight — quite something for 1906! Sadly, it is missing from the only scan of the work I can find. Most of his published photographs, that can be found online, are monochrome and not overpainted. In the 1920s he made short films of botanical interest.

According to the same issue of ”Country-side”, he had:

the reputation of the cleverest naturalist photographer in Eastern Europe [and] there can be no doubt that if [his pictures] are not the results of simple photography, they represent the most skilful art

The above version of the Hoopoe plate appears in The Living Animals of the World, Volume 2, by Charles J. Cornish et al., circa 1902. The photographer was credited, as he often was, as “C. N. Mavroyeni”

The image file came from a copy on The Gutenberg Project; a different scan of the same work is available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Another version of the plate is in the two-volume Birds of Our County; and can be seen in the recent Amazon listing of a copy (should anyone want to treat me!).

User Dictionaries – a Fundamental Design Flaw

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I have just had to add several words to the user dictionary for the spell-checker in Notepad++, that I have already added to my user dictionary in LibreOffice, and to my user dictionary in (all under Windows 10 – does this happen with user dictionaries under Unix & Mac operating systems?).

Notepad++ spell-checker, not recognising the word 'Mabbett'

Under , a user should not have to accept a word’s spelling more than once.

User dictionaries should not be in a “walled garden” within an application. They should exist at operating-system level, or more specifically, at user-account level.

Or, until Microsoft (and other operating system vendors) implement this, applications — at least, open source applications like those listed above — should make their user dictionaries accessible to each other.

Some issues to consider: users with dictionaries in more than one language; security.

Prior art: I raised a Notepad++ ticket about this. It was (not unreasonably) closed, with a pointer to this DSpellCheck ticket on the same subject.

Bromptons in Museums and Art Galleries

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Every time I visit London, with my Brompton bicycle of course, I try to find time to take in a museum or art gallery. Some are very accommodating and will cheerfully look after a folded Brompton in a cloakroom (e.g. Tate Modern, Science Museum) or, more informally, in an office or behind the security desk (Bank of England Museum, Petrie Museum, Geffrye Museum; thanks folks).


Brompton bicycle folded

When folded, Brompton bikes take up very little space

Others, without a cloakroom, have lockers for bags and coats, but these are too small for a Brompton (e.g. Imperial War Museum, Museum of London) or they simply refuse to accept one (V&A, British Museum).

A Brompton bike is not something you want to chain up in the street, and carrying a hefty bike-lock would defeat the purpose of the bike’s portability.


Jack Wills, New Street (geograph 4944811)

This Brompton bike hire unit, in Birmingham, can store ten folded bikes each side. The design could be repurposed for use at venues like museums or galleries.

I have an idea. Brompton could work with museums — in London, where Brompton bikes are ubiquitous, and elsewhere, though my Brompton and I have never been turned away from a museum outside London — to install lockers which can take a folded Brompton. These could be inside with the bag lockers (preferred) or outside, using the same units as their bike hire scheme (pictured above).

Where has your Brompton had a good, or bad, reception?

Update

Less than two hours after I posted this, Will Butler-Adams, MD of Brompton, >replied to me on Twitter:

so now I’m reaching out to museums, in London to start with, to see who’s interested.

Four Stars of Open Standards

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I’m writing this at UKGovCamp, a wonderful unconference. This post constitutes notes, which I will flesh out and polish later.

I’m in a session on open standards in government, convened by my good friend Terence Eden, who is the Open Standards Lead at Government Digital Service, part of the United Kingdom government’s Cabinet Office.

Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s “Five Stars of Open Data“, I’ve drafted “Four Stars of Open Standards”.

These are:

  1. Publish your content consistently
  2. Publish your content using a shared standard
  3. Publish your content using an open standard
  4. Publish your content using the best open standard

Bonus points for:

  • making clear which standard you use
  • publishing your content under an open licence
  • contributing your experience to the development of the standard.

Point one, if you like is about having your own local standard — if you publish three related data sets for instance, be consistent between them.

Point two could simply mean agreeing a common standard with other items your organisation, neighbouring local authorities, or suchlike.

In points three and four, I’ve taken “open” to be the term used in the “Open Definition“:

Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).

Further reading:

HASLibCamp

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I remember fondly my first unconference, UKLocalGovCamp, in Birmingham in 2009. It really was life-changing for me; the way it opened my eyes to the possibilities of disruptive innovation was the catalyst for me eventually becoming a freelancer. I made many long-standing friends, makers and activists inside and outside local government, there, too.

Since then I’ve attended many more, and have run or facilitated a good number of unconferences, and unconference-style sessions within more traditional types of events. If I say so myself, it’s something I’m good at, and I certainly enjoy it.

So I was pleased, last Saturday, to be able to spend the day in London to attend, and help to facilitate, HASLibCamp, an unconference for librarians in the field of Health and Science. That’s a relatively narrow focus, and so the event wasn’t as big as some I’ve been to, but in no way did that diminish the quality of the sessions, nor the participants’ enthusiasm.

After housekeeping and introductions on behalf of our host, the Department of Library & Information Science at London City University (CityLIS), I asked for a few shows-of-hands, and quickly determined that we had been joined by academic, commercial, hospital and public librarians, and archivists, as well as some student librarians.

I then explained how unconferences work, and invited any of them who wanted to, to give a thirty-second “pitch” for a session in which they wanted to participate, or a topic they wished to discuss.

Luckily, we had just the right number of pitches for the rooms and timeslots available, leaving two gaps after lunch, which were filled during the day with follow-up sessions. A “chill out” room was also avaialable, as was space for ad-hoc discussions and meetings.


whiteboard with list of sessions, in timetable format

The pitched sessions.

I pitched two sessions, one on ORCID identifiers (what they are, and how librarians can help to embed them in their organisations), and another – in response to a request received before the event – on Wikipedia, Wikidata and my work as a Wikimedian in Residence.

I also attended a session on what public libraries might learn about giving healthcare information, from academic libraries. Several resources were mentioned and are linked in the Storify reporting (see below). My final session was billed as being about understanding customer needs, and took the form of a lateral-thinking exercise.

Here’s a brief roundup of coverage elsewhere:

I’m grateful to the Consortium of Independent Health Libraries in London (CHILL) for sponsoring my attendance at the event (a condition of which was that this blog post be written).

An open letter to Rupa Huq, MP, regarding official Parliamentary videos

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Dear Dr. Huq,

I have been very interested to read about your recent call for an end to the prohibition on the use of footage from official parliamentary broadcasts in satirical programmes, made at the behest of your brother-in-law and constituent, the television personality Charlie Brooker.


Rupa Huq 2015

Rupa Huq

I was equally disappointed at the stance of the (Conservative) Leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling MP, who said:

it is very important that we make sure the coverage of this House is use in an appropriate way — I am not in favour of it being used for satire programmes.

He is wrong, because satire is not an inappropriate use of such footage, which is made with public funds.

But the right to use it in satire is not enough — we should all be able to use it wherever we want, freely. For example, on Wikipedia, for educational purposes. And for that reason, it should be made available under an “open licence”, allowing anyone to use it, for any purpose (subject, of course, to existing laws such as those on decency and defamation), with the only requirement being to attribute the source. (I have written previously about what open licensing is and why it should apply to media about politicians.)

Please take up Mr Grayling’s suggestion, and pursue your campaign with the Commons’ administration committee — but please don’t limit your request to the right to satirise. Please push for full open licensing.

Thank you.