Talk:List of Rijksmonuments

Sources?

Is there any list which can be used as source, to identify which Dutch places are Rijksmonuments or not? The Rijksmonument (Netherlands) article is gloomy on whether any public lists are available. How does one determine if a site is one or not? doncram (talk) 22:44, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be best to only add monuments to this list-article if a registry number is known and/or a specific reference documenting the Rijksmonument listing is added. I am wary, because in other nations there are many prominent historic buildings which are NOT listed on their corresponding registries. For example in the U.S. many extremely old and prominent historic churches and early skyscrapers and other properties that I know of are not included on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, because the owners themselves can and do choose to opt out of listing. So just because a given building is very old and listing-worthy, it is not necessarily a Rijksmonument.

In many Dutch mills articles, such as for the three mills mentioned in the Rijksmonument (Netherlands) article, there is a Rijksmonument registry number given, supported by a technical footnote. I do believe that is adequate support. I'll add those here, to make a start. doncram (talk) 20:35, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Many significant Dutch buildings which have articles on Wikipedia are likely to be Rijksmonuments. The challenge is to find the info and add it to the article and the article to the list. It may be worth googling the name of the building with the word "Rijksmonument nummer" added to the search terms. Currently the list is windmill heavy, but that is because the Rijksmonument status of mills is well documented by De Hollandsche Molen and the Molendatabase. Mjroots (talk) 07:08, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually searching that way just now for one, the Hollandse Manege works perfectly well, finding this page: http://www.bma.amsterdam.nl/monumenten/beschrijvingen/hollandse_manege . It doesn't give a number, but it does label it "Rijksmonument" on the page, which suffices for me. Probably there would be some way to navigate from, or search from, the main page http://www.bma.amsterdam.nl to find which other Rijksmonumenten in Amsterdam that it documents. If you can figure out how that site works, I would be happy to work ahead at listing out any/all of those that it documents. Or perhaps we could correspond with that organization and get a list of them, including their Rijksmonument nummers and listing dates.

Also by the way I notice this list-article would be DYK-eligible any time one wanted to write a 1,500 character intro, as a 5X expansion over its one sentence current intro. The entire list itself does not count in the DYK eligibility. I notice it got 345 hits the day that the Rijksmonument (Netherlands) DYK appeared (which got 3,500 hits). Perhaps after we find develop the list a bit more? I will avoid adding to the intro, just to maintain the DYK-possibility. doncram (talk) 20:22, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

scope of the list

I notice that this list opens with the statement "This is a list of Rijksmonuments which have articles on the English language Wikipedia."

I think this is not a very satisfactory approach, as it introduces Wikipedia itself as a source of which Rijksmonumenten are sufficiently notable to list. This introduces a non-neutral point of view as a monument needs only one fan to get an article on Wikipedia, this says nothing about the importance of the monument. (And each rijksmonument would probably make the notability criterion to avoid deletion altogether). Additionally, by browsing Wikipedia for Dutch buildings (rather then by starting from a list of monuments) those articles accidentily known by the editors will appear on this list more readily. A striking example of this kind of skewed point of view is the fact that the list currently list 30 windmills from Drente, while the Dom Tower of Utrecht is not mentioned; and not even Rietveld Schröder House which besides being a Rijksmonument is also recognised on the Unesco world heritage list (nor in fact any other monument in the province of Utrecht). Indeed none of the eight Unesco listed monuments are listed here (i.e Woudagemaal, Stelling Amsterdam, Molens bij Kinderdijk). We really have to find a way to take this forward in a neutral comprehensive way. The Dutch Rijksmonument article mentions 51000 monuments, but also gives lists for many cities. Arnoutf (talk) 11:39, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Later note: not all Unesco are rijksmonumenten, the mills from kinderdijk are individually monuments, and the stelling van amsterdam as well (I don't know if all are). The Waddenzee, or deltawerken for example are not monuments. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 16:37, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

The problem with articles not being added to the list is one of verification. All such articles where it is verified that the building is a Rijksmonument are included in the list. I suspect that there are many more buildings which have articles and are Rijksmonuments, but the article does not state that fact. You mention the Dom Tower. The article does not state that it is a Rijksmonument. The list is dominated by windmills because I've been creating articles on surviving Dutch windmills, and adding those that are listed as Rijksmonuments to the list. This has been aided by the fact that the De Hollandsche Molen website gives the RM number on each webpage for a windmill where the mill is listed. The solution is to source the fact that a builing is listed, add that fact to the article, add the article to the Category:Rijksmonuments and then add to the list. It this list gets too large, it can easily be split by province in a similar way to the List of windmills in the Netherlands is. Mjroots (talk) 13:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Re notability, WP:HSITES would probably hold the view that a Rijksmonument is notable enough to sustain its own article. I'm not sure that all Rijksmonuments are notable enough for this, but being listed is a good sign that it is likely to be notable enough to sustain an article, subject to the usual critera of WP:V via WP:RS and enough material being available to write an article of at least start class. I don't see that 51,000 stubs saying that Building X in town Y, province Z is a Rijksmonument is really going to be useful if that is as much that can be said about the building. Mjroots (talk) 13:15, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. However, that does not much to lighten my worry. Basically the list that is being created here is nothing more than an expanded version of the "category:Rijksmonuments". The opening line is thus not entirely correct in saying "This is a list of Rijksmonuments which have articles on the English language Wikipedia." as it becomes clear that "This is a list of Rijksmonuments which have articles on the English language Wikipedia; and in their article are explicitly referred to as a Rijksmonument". That is however a matter of wording

The big question is whether a mainspace article in Wikipedia should aim for a comprehensive overview of the topic regardless of other Wikipedia articles (in other words, if a list of Rijksmonuments is created, that list should be more or less complete, or should cover the main Rijksmonuments, regardless of whether that information is on Wikipedia) or that giving an overview of information from other places in Wikipedia in itself (regardless of the real world value of the information) is sufficient to make an article notable. Note that I am talking about notability of the list itself, ie this article, not about the individual Rijksmonuments. For the Monuments I agree with your arguments.

The latter approach of reporting only Wikipedia information seems to be taken on this list. Personally I think such an looking inwards into Wikipedia is not satisfactory for a mainspace article or list (as contrasted against categories, or Wikimedia commons, etc. which have that explicit aim).

For example, the unwary reader may easily skip the disclaimer that it only concerns rijksmonuments on Wikipedia and infer this is a comprehensive list and conclude that Drenthe is an infinitely more historical area than Utrecht. I hope you agree that this is not the message we want to tell.

So in my view this artice should aim for a comprehensive list of (at least all important as 51,000 would be overdoing it indeed) Rijksmonumenten to be of any value to the readers of Wikipedia. Arnoutf (talk) 13:28, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

After some googling. There is a list of all Dutch monumenten. It can be downloaded from the Dutch Goverment [[1]]. It also available at [[2]]

The Dom tower has number 36075. I would like it to the infobox, but that only allows for US listed monuments (so much for international view of Wikipedia).

Perhaps we should try to get to some structured approach towards Dutch rijksmonuments, perhaps through the Netherlands project or something? Arnoutf (talk) 14:05, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

If the list is to be substantially expanded, then it will definitely need to split by province. It may be necessary to split further - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht could probably support their own lists in time. Other areas could split by Gemeente.

One reason that only those that were verifiable got put into the list was that I couldn't tell which other buildings were Rijksmonuments and which weren't, so I played safe. By all means expand the list if you can. However, I would prefer some evidence in the article re the status of the building in question. Mjroots (talk) 17:40, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I fully support your verifiability demand. We may need to start making separate articles later on but lets do that when it becomes necessary. The nl:Rijksmonument article and its subsidiary lists may give some inspiration

All this gave me something to think about the articles of the building themselves. Perhaps we should consider identifying Rijksmonumenten e.g. by providing their number and a link to source in their own articles, and adding them to the category. That will be a lot of work but with the official list from the Dutch government it should be feasible.

That way we have a comprehensive coverage from all Rijksmonumenten in Wikipedia, which would already make this less of a windmill skewed list. Arnoutf (talk) 17:52, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Linking via the RM# to the official list entry would be a good way of dealing with the verification problem. I agree that the list shouldn't be biased towards the windmills. As a start, what about splitting off Drenthe and Friesland into their own lists? I think they are long enough at the moment to be able to sustain this. Mjroots (talk) 18:27, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I was told about this discussion. On the dutch wiki a general project has been started to describe heritage in the Netherlands: nl:Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Erfgoed. This is just an umbrella to bring similair projects together. Under this we have now a project running to make lists of all dutch 'rijksmonumenten' here: nl:Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Erfgoed/Nederlandse Erfgoed Inventarisatie. We basically took the lists from the dutch department that has also been linked above, and made a list per dutch city. At the moment we are still struggling how to best deal with big and small lists, for Amsterdam somebody splitted over districts already, the small ones now go in the article about the list itself. If the lists are more or less complete, we will start motivating people to make pictures. This gives you an idea about what we are doing on the nl-wikipedia at the moment. Akoopal (talk) 20:12, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I have been using your lists (I am impressed by the amount of work you have done on NL Wiki there!) to identify some of the Rijksmonuments and add this Template:Rijksmonument to their pages (see e.g. Dom Tower of Utrecht.

At some stage we will probably have to split here as well, but let's get it started first. Thanks for the notice. Arnoutf (talk) 20:17, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

You are welkom. The bulk of the work is done by others, but a lot is being done. My stand on 'rijksmonumenten' btw, I think in principle every monument is encyclopedic, so at least deserves a place on these lists, only you probably can't write a decent article about every monument. So that is also why I wouldn't be in favour of a rule like 'only on the list when there is an article'. Akoopal (talk) 08:51, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

I tend to agree, Categories are for articles on Wikipedia, lists should aim to be comprehensive. Nevertheless, I think the most important monuments should be entered first, and many of these will have an article, so working from the monuments we have articles on would be a good start in my opinion.

BTW, I am currently tagging the monument articles with the template, which makes them appear in the category, the category is then usable as an efficient way to add articles here. Arnoutf (talk) 17:47, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

A good site for rijksmonuments is [www.kich.nl], it's mapbases overview of all rijksmonuments (and some other kinds of cultural places) from the dutch government. Greetings, NL_Bas (talk) 21:13, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Good to see a bit more discussion. I agree that every RM should at least be mentioned in a list. As I've said above, I started the list with those buildings that I could verify were RMs, knowing full well that many more RMs had article but it was not stated in the article that the building was a RM. This remains the case.

Re the splitting of lists, the head list is this one. Eventually I imagine it will look much the same as the List of windmills in the Netherlands. The next split should be by Province. All provinces are in this list, although some are hidden ready for use. If a province list gets too large, then split by Gemeente (or district for Amsterdam - not sure about splitting Den Haag and Rotterdam but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it). Mjroots (talk) 08:50, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I've split the Drenthe and Friesland entries into separate lists as they were getting quite long. Not sure at the moment whether to split Noord Holland or not, but that will need to split off at some point. Mjroots (talk) 20:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Shield

In the list is mentioned that the shield indicates whether a building is a rijksmonument or not. This is wrong. The blue shield indicates whether a building is culturally important. For example: Also a library (non-rijksmonument) can have a blue shield if it contains books that are cultural important. Also by far not al of the rijksmonuments have a blue shield. From what I've seen myself (and I've seen pretty much of the rijksmonuments) not even 20% has a blue shield. Greets, NL_Bas (talk) 21:17, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Category:Rijksmonuments

There are now 126 article in this category. Is it time yet to consider sub-cats by Province? Mjroots (talk) 09:00, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Definitely! And I see that for some provinces that has already started. I am trying to clean this list up for the WLM photo contest in September. The best thing would be to convert the lists from the Dutch wikipedia. This is the best format which even includes the RM numbers needed to reference the monuments in the Dutch Heritage register. I think some work is needed to do this, but the best thing may be to just link to the NL Wikipedia as the definitive source. I can't imagine doing this for 100+ languages, but then some languages may only include a few hundred NL monuments, such as museums, and Unesco sites. Jane (talk) 15:28, 22 May 2011 (UTC)