«Wiki Loves Monuments» — это общественный фото-конкурс людей, которые фотографируют культурные памятники в своих странах и загружают эти фотографии на сайт «Wikimedia Commons». Конкурс впервые прошёл в 2010 году в Нидерландах и собрал 12,5 тысяч фотографий тамошних памятников. Через год в 2011 году он повторился во всей Европе и собрал больше 167 тысяч фотоснимков культурных памятников.
В этом году получится всемирный конкурс, который затронет много стран по всему миру — в том числе Чили, Индию, Панаму, Филиппины, Россию и США.
Конкурс «Wiki Loves Monuments» устроен для того, чтобы подначить читателей интернета и википедии, фотографов, любителей и вообще людей, которым интересны памятники культуры, — сделать фотографии этих памятников и опубликовать их на сайте «Wikimedia Commons» под свободной лицензией, чтобы эти снимки можно было использовать любым людям и для любых целей. В том числе они пригодятся и для википедии.
Конкурс проводится в «федеративной» манере, поэтому нет общего определения для памятника. Местные организаторы сами определяют, что такое памятник, опираясь на казённые документы и правительственные списки. Федеративность означает, что каждая страна устраивает свой конкурс, а уж эти конкурсы сочетаются в большой международный.
Конечно, есть общие советы, которые помогут местным конкурсам сотрудничать друг с другом; эти советы (или даже правила) будут обозначены чуть ниже.
Конкурс «Wiki Loves Monuments» устраивает вики-сообщество при помощи местных отделений Wikimedia. Подготовку конкурса берут на себя активные пользователи вики-сайтов, которым интересно культурное наследие, а местные отделения помогают им с пропагандой, юридическими проблемами, поиском призов и спонсоров (если нужно).
The 2012 edition will be internationally facilitated by a small team of volunteers involved in the organisation of the previous contest: Lodewijk Gelauff and Maarten Dammers from the Netherlands (who led the successful 2010 pilot), Elke Wetzig and Nicole Ebber from Germany, and Tomasz Kozłowski from Poland. You can try to approach those people on their talk pages, but as the contest is organised by a wider group of helpful volunteers, an even better choice would be to consult the public mailing list.
For a detailed information on the responsibilities of those people, please refer to our who's who page.
That's a tricky question! Organising Wiki Loves Monuments takes a lot of effort and time: to get an overview of what's ahead of the organisers this year, please have a look at our detailed timeline. Most countries need at least a couple of months to involve volunteers, start partnerships and find sponsors, not to mention preparing the lists of monuments and setting up proper categories on Wikimedia Commons, which take a huge amount of time.
If you feel like doing it in your country, the sooner you start, the better — but if we have to set a deadline, then the end of May seems to be the last call for joining the contest this year; however, such a late joining would require your local team to invest a lot of work into the preparations in a very tight timespan, so please look before you leap.
First of all, thank you for having the courage to ask for help; for us, it's always better to know that you might need help than not to have a clue about that. The international team can help you with several things, especially those related to the technical part of the preparations: we can assist you with setting up e-mail queues, preparing UploadWizard in your language, designing and starting your local website, tools, etc.
We can also help out with a trademark agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation, and for the European countries, get you in touch with the right people through our last years' partnerships. If you feel that a brainstorming meeting in your country with one of us present would be helpful, too, please let us know, and we'll try to help; we have some budget available to accommodate in case your chapter or local Wikimedia group has no funds.
If you have a very specific request, please also have a look at the who's who page to see whom you might directly contact about your needs.
Сколько победителей будет в русском конкурсе «Wiki Loves Monuments»?
Каждая страна сама определяет, сколько призов и победителей будет в местном конкурсе. Всё в ваших руках! Например, в 2011 году было 22 победителя в Бельгии, а вот в Румынии жюри выбрало только 3 победителей.
Каждая страна может передать 10 предложений на международный конкурс; обычно это местные победители или какие-то особо выбранные членами жюри снимки (так называемые достойные внимания).
Is it obligatory to register a top-level wikilovesmonuments.TLD domain?
We are aware that in various countries around the world, one is not able to register a top-level domain without having registered a trademark first due to legal requirements. This situation, in fact, has already happened in Portugal last year, forcing the local organisers to register another domain (wikilovesmonuments.org.pt) and leaving their TLD unregistered. If such a situation exists in your country, too, you are of course totally allowed to register another domain of your wish or to use a subdomain of a domain you already own.
If you cannot register a top-level domain in your country due to other issues — for instance because there is no Wikimedia chapter in the country or the existing chapter or group cannot afford buying a domain or hosting — please bring the problem to our attention by posting to the mailing list; there isn't yet a clearly defined procedure on how to deal with such situations, but we'll definitely try to help.
However, if your local Wikimedia chapter or group can afford buying the top-level domain of your country, we would strongly suggest to do so; even if you would be using another domain, you could prevent the TLD from unpleasant cybersquatting.
There is more than one language used in my country, how do I deal with that?
Organising a Wiki Loves Monuments in a country with more than one official language would, of course, require some additional effort, especially with translations. In fact, this situation has already happened last year in Belgium and Switzerland, to name just a few countries, and there is some experience we can share.
The biggest problem (or "opportunity") would be to create identical lists in two or more languages and publish them on appropriate Wikipedias; the only requirement is to use the same monument identifiers on all lists (the rest of the information can be localised). Please contact Maarten, the original designer of the database, for further information on how to prepare such lists for your country.
The upload process itself, which uses UploadWizard and a Wiki Loves Monuments overlay (an "UploadCampaign"), is fully translatable into as many languages as it is required. In 2011, every country had UploadCampaigns in its official language (or languages) and an English language for non-native speakers who might have wanted to take part in the competition. Translations are prepared by volunteers, including local organisers, and posted to Wikimedia Commons with help from the administrators; a similar scheme is being used to prepare CentralNotice banners on Meta.
What are the suggested partners for a local Wiki Loves Monuments?
Choosing partners for a local Wiki Loves Monuments is one of the most important things that every country should decide on by itself, and we can only advise you about whom you should contact, as there are too many differences between how cultural heritage sectors are organised from country to country.
There are basically three types of partners one can imagine:
Governmental partners — you will need to compile a list of monuments, and getting an official list from your government with as much detail as possible would be very helpful. Cooperating with them could be extra useful for both sides, too, because people will more likely find mistakes in the original lists that could be reported back to the partner.
Publicity partners — those are partners that can help you with getting the word out, reaching specific audiences and media; e.g. non-governmental cultural heritage organisations, photographer organisations, schools organisation etc.
Sponsors — they can provide you with awards for the winners and possibly cover some of the costs of the event.
Last year, a list of possible partners was prepared as an outcome of a pan-European meeting held in Berlin on May 13-15; please have a look if those suggestion apply to your country, too. If you're having trouble with contacting partners or finding the right people, try to approach Maarten, who is in touch with our European partners, and he might be able to give you a helping hand.
The rules—or "recommendations", as we prefer to call them—for last year were agreed on during the meeting in Berlin. The six most important were identified as follow:
All photos participating in the competition had to be self-taken and self-uploaded;
Upload was made possible in September only, both to Wikimedia Commons and an interim external website, e.g. Flickr or Google Picasa;
All eligible pictures had to have an identifier, given by the participants during upload;
Participants had to have their e-mail enabled on Wikimedia Commons (or the platform they uploaded their photos to) to be eligible for prizes;
Every country was able to nominate 10 pictures to the European stage of the competition.
We hope that at least some of those recommendations could be used in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, but as it is going to be much bigger than the two previous editions combined, there surely might be a need to adjust them to fit the future requirements of the contest. The final decision on the rules will be taken jointly by all people involved in organising WLM 2012 in the months to come.
What are the technical requirements for the pictures?
Due to the federal nature of the competition, there haven't been any general technical requirements for the pictures last year; all self-taken and self-uploaded photos that fulfilled the other basic rules (see above) and filled in the Wikimedia Commons scope were accepted into the contest, as the main goal of WLM 2011 was to collect as many pictures usable for Wikipedia as possible. Local organisers and local juries were able to define their precise requirements independently, and choose their winners accordingly.
It has been voiced by some members of the Wikimedia Commons community that many pictures uploaded for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 were of a bad quality. It would definitely be against the openness of the competition to set any technical requirements for the photos; however, there are already some ideas about how to help the participants improve the quality of their pictures, and the topic will surely be discussed in preparation for this years' contest.
Wiki Loves Monuments is not about any photos: it's about photos of monuments, about beautiful photos of monuments, and about beautiful photos of monuments that suit the encyclopaedic purpose of Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects). Hence, it was agreed that a jury should take into consideration all those values when taking its decision on the winners, both locally and internationally.
In order to balance those three values—and also to involve external sponsors and partners—most of last years' juries consisted of professional photographers, cultural heritage specialists and Wikimedians (seven people in the international jury), who took their decisions in a joint manner. In some countries there was also a vote open for the public, in which Wikimedians chose their favourites, but this should be considered only an addition to the regular decision of a jury.
Following last years' experiences, we will be using the UploadWizard simplified by a special Wiki Loves Monuments overlay (an UploadCampaign). To simplify the upload process even more, a country can choose to use an interim website or storage service, e.g. Flickr or Google Picasa, and import files from those websites to Wikimedia Commons with a special bot.
Pictures can be uploaded using other tools (e.g. Commonist), but as this requires further knowledge of wiki markup and Wikimedia Commons itself, in the previous years those methods were used only by more experienced editors. Creating a simplified mass-upload tool for use by inexperienced participants was identified as one of the tasks for this years' preparations; there are already some behind-the-scenes works being held and more information should be known as the time passes by.
