Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2013/Future

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This page will serve as a discussion page to figure out whether and how a 'Wiki Loves' competition will be organized in the near future (2014).

Introductions[edit]

Background[edit]

Wiki Loves as a concept has been around since 2009, when the first was organized based on the following principles:

  • 1 month
  • low threshold for participating
  • competition with a jury and prizes
  • since 2011: national competitions and an international finale.

Wiki Loves Monuments has been a big success since 2010 - and since 2011 it has been organized internationally. In 2013 more than 50 countries have participated, making this the largest international 'real life' collaboration effort involving many chapters and non-chapter organizing groups.

However, in the past months we did note that in quite a few countries the volunteer enthusiasm is scaling back. That means that national competitions are being organized by smaller teams, less people have to do the work. That has an impact on the motivation, quality and reliability. Also, initial data suggest (but we will not know this for sure until further analysis has been made) that the interest from the general audience has also decreased a bit - even though the number of submitted pictures still has grown.

At the same time there have been efforts to organize similar competitions with different scopes (Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Public Art). At Wikimania we had a discussion about the Future of Wiki Loves Monuments which brought up many ways to improve the concept, but especially many ways to use the same concept in different scopes. Discussions after this workshop have also suggested several times that it might be worth considering alternatives.

Questions[edit]

For me (Lodewijk) the big questions to be answered are the following:

  • Should we (Wikimedia) organize again in 2014 an international competition with a similar structure to Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 (but not necessarily the same scope)?
  • If yes, what should be the scope for 2014
  • If a scope is chosen, there are many practical concerns to look into, such as the month, the organizing structure and potential network partner organizations.
  • If a scope is chosen, an international team has to be set up.

Lets have a fair and open discussion about this. I suggest to use this page (no need to use the talkpage I think), below here. If you feel that the content of this introduction is biased, the talkpage is the way to go though :)

Links to more information[edit]

General background information[edit]

Specific examples[edit]

Discussion[edit]

Should there be a major international competition in 2014?[edit]

Arguments for[edit]

  • It gives momentum to many national organizers because of the enthusiasm and international feeling
  • The international infrastructure supports practically local organizers - overhead is smaller
  • Big international efforts make the press more easily
  • There are so many topics that require a photo!

(please add)

Arguments against[edit]

  • The effort of organizing everything at the same moment is not always convenient. Only doing national contests gets rid of this.
  • It is very hard to find dedicated volunteers to run the international competition.

(please add)

Discussion[edit]

What should be the scope?[edit]

General discussion[edit]

  • In my opinion one of the strengths of Wiki Loves Monuments was a well defined scope and known lists. Because there are lists, the lists contain an id and extra data, you can via the id attach that information to the image. That way for example a monument picture was attached to the correct place-category where the uploader only attached the id. Due to this, we not only got a lot of pictures, but also pictures that are in principle usable because you can find them. Whatever subject is chosen, please keep this in mind, that we not only want a lot of pictures, but also having the pictures usable. And this is something that you can't simply leave to the general uploader, because they don't understand how the categorisation works, and also relying on volunteers isn't an option, because of the amounts. Of course having some fields in the uploadform to ask for information can be an option for this, but it should be relatively simple. BTW, I wouldn't mind one last WLM as 5 WLM's seems to be a very nice number. Akoopal (talk) 12:47, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • A decision to organise WLM 2014 or not is a quite tricky one. I would say that we have three different groups of countries:
    1. Countries having held WLM for several years where almost all notable / easily accessible monuments are already pictured (e.g. France, the Netherlands, Andorra). In order to participate once more, special efforts will be probably needed to motivate people upload something else than 954th photo of Eiffel Tower / 456th photo of Amsterdam Royal Palace and concentrate on not yet pictured monuments.
    2. Countries having organised WLM for a year or two, but that are still far from good coverage of monuments. Those may still want to participate next year following the success of the previous edition (e.g. in Ukraine we still did not manage to get full lists for several regions, and we observed a growth of participation in the regions where lists were updated this year, and such countries as China, Egypt, Thailand are definitely far from saturation)
    3. Countries having not yet participated but having rich cultural heritage and an active wiki community (e.g. Bangladesh, Croatia, Indonesia etc.). An international contest will definitely motivate those countries to join, while it may be to difficult for them to establish contest infrastructure alone.
  • In my view, WLM has not yet reached all potentially interested countries, thus organising the "last international" WLM may be a good solution to reach more countries and help them establish infrastructure if they want to continue WLM in 2015, 2016 etc. On the other hand, we should seriously prepare a future alternative to WLM, with probably a smaller-scale international contest being organised for interested countries (in a similar way as WLPA was held this year). This will let those countries choose if they want to participate in one contest or in both — NickK (talk) 18:01, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Please add arguments (summarized) above too.
    It might be good to note that not organizing WLM in 2014 but another topic, doesn't have to mean it will never return. I just feel that the motivation has decreased in many countries, and the overhead to organize (funding, reporting etc) has increased on many levels. The overall balance just topples to the 'lets skip a year' imho, but I like to hear more thoughts. Using a different topic, might bring this balance back to 'lets go' because the enthusiasm can be renewed. Then in one or two years from now, we can revive the Wiki Loves Monuments with renewed enthusiasm, too. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:25, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    My arguments concern mostly organising WLM or not organising WLM, but not organising a major contest or organising no contest at all, thus they are not exactly relevant to the previous section. In my view, an internationl contest should take place, the question is just what will it be and what scale it will have (more like WLPA 2013 or like WLM 2013) — NickK (talk) 18:59, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • WLM has been a federated contest that is made up of several national contests. So, the primary decision would be with the local teams or the supporting chapters respectively: they have to decide what kind of contest(s) they want to run in 2014. Once we know who is likely to run what kind of contest next year, we can coordinate the dates at the international level in order to avoid unwanted overlaps. Furthermore, all the countries planning the same type of contest can decide whether they want to organize an international contest on top of that, closely coordinating their organizing processes, or whether they want to organize their contests in a more independent fashion. I think, after three years experience, people should know what the advantages/disadvantages of a big international contest are (if not, there are plenty of people whom they can ask). Similarly, people should know what it takes to organize a national contest (if not, please ask Lodewijk or someone else who has gone through the experience several times). - I don't think we need a long discussion at an international level at this point, but rather decisions of national contest organizers. Based on these, we can move on; the more time we are wasting on discussions now, the less time we'll have for organizing the contests, setting up adequate partnerships, mobilizing new volunteers to help with organizational tasks, preparing the lists and the tools, etc. --Beat Estermann (talk) 12:24, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • On the Hungarian Wikipedia there was very few community member, who was able to take (or wanted to upload) good quality images, the illustrations of the encyclopedia were usually quite poor, if there was at all. Therefore since my registration in 2007 I tried to work on change this: I recreated the inactive feature image process and successfully promoted uploading quality images, then organized some photo contests. But with these contests we couldn't (effectively) reach external photographers, photo communities. WLM in 2011 helped a lot in this issue, because we organized the contest in partnership with (one of) the larges Hungarian photo shearing site and photographer community, and by the contest we could involve around 300 new photographer into Wikimedia-world, and some of them stayed active in Wikimedia projects after the end of the contest (compared to about five earlier photographers it was a big step). Next year we missed the WLM and we had no photo contest until WLM2013, and number of active photographers dropped down again. This year, there was about 140 participants of WLM Hungary, most of them are new users in the Wikimedia world, hopefully some of them will stay active after the contest. In the last 5-6 years, my goal was to build a photographer community beside the editors community (sometimes there is overlap between the two groups, but in my experience it is more often that somebody is more active in one of these groups). These photo contests help a lot to motivate existing photographer and involve new participants into our projects, and I feel even the one-year period is too long to keep the interest and activity on the same level. If we offered for example photo contest in every 4th month (3 big contests pro year), the process of the contests (1 month campaign before the contest, 1 month contest, about 1 month for the jury process and then prize giving ceremony, surveys) could fill in the whole year, and we could keep the attention and motivation continuously on the right level. So, my opinion, we don't need to choose between ideas below but we should choose the (3?) ideas with most supports and realize all of them. The only thing that we have to find the best timing for the certain contests in the calendar. Do we need to do it on international level? Working together is always more fun and it has a lot of additional advantages. Specially for Hungary it is (would be) very important to organize these type of contests together with the surrounding countries (Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Austria), because of historical and cultural reasons there are a lot of Hungarian related objects and cultural connections with these countries (and still significant Hungarian minority lives there). Summarized: I would propose more international photo contests through the year with different scopes, but with the same infrastructure and tools, with similar rules, and every country/group/community can decide in which one would like to participate. Samat (talk) 22:46, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    The idea of a several big photo concepts each year is quite interesting, and timing is what definitely needs to be coordinated. From Ukrainian experience this year (we had Wiki Loves Earth in April-May and Wiki Loves Monuments in September) it worked well, and we were able to organise two contests on a high level enough. International coordination is definitely needed: for example, it would be definitely easier to have monument lists, bots and jury tools available once for all countries and not let each country create their own tools. The timing of three contests a year is however quite problematic: while we are used to have WLM in September, this means that two other contests should be in December-January and April-May. I do not know which contest would be good to organise in winter, but it is definitely not an option for Wiki Loves Earth (who likes white trees in white fields next to white frozen ponds?)
    P.S. Concerning your idea of «Hungarian related objects in ... », we had special nominations in Ukrainian WLM this year in partnership with Greek and Armenian societies in Ukraine. If we will have interest from Hungarian organisations in Ukraine, we would be happy to organise such special nomination for Hungarian heritage — NickK (talk) 01:59, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Earth[edit]

  • It is easy and strighforward to organize - probably even easier than WLM - but there is a question about good, international definition of the objects in scope. In Poland we have an official list of "natural monuments" (mainly old big trees) - but photographing only them would be probably boring. Polimerek (talk) 08:49, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I think that actually everything listed at pl:Ochrona przyrody w Polsce#Formy ochrony przyrody w Polsce is eligible for WLE. I agree that big old trees may be quite boring to picture, but Poland still has 6952 użytki ekologiczne, 1469 rezerwaty przyrody and other categories, giving a total of over 10,000 natural sites even without pomniki przyrody. You may decide that 10,000 natural sites (without "natural monuments") is enough or you may want to add those "natural monuments" as well and have a list of some 50,000 natural sites — NickK (talk) 16:43, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    It might work if the requirement is to illustrate a previously unillustrated article on any Wikipedia or Wikivoyage - but I am afraid this would be too complicated for most of the participants.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:22, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    From our experience in Ukraine this year, it works quite well on the same basis as WLM: a list of natural heritage sites is provided and users may upload pictures no matter whether an article exists or not. Moreover, this motivates creation of articles on those natural heritage sites and/or expanding articles about cities and towns with information on nearby natural heritage sites — NickK (talk) 16:43, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I think a country dependent approach will always be necessary. But there has to be a clear choice between natural areas or objects. Do you want people to zoom in extremely on an insect? For most EU countries you could use the Natura 2000 definition to start with, and add whatever national definition there is for natural parks etc. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:52, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    This year in Ukraine we recommended to upload picture of wide views and representative biotopes. The second one is rather tricky, as we need to do much more research to find out which particular species are associated with a particular natural area. The goal is definitely not to get photos of particular insects, plants and objects but to illustrate natural areas. Natura 2000 definition is a good start, but it would be great to have as many protected areas on the list as possible — NickK (talk) 17:57, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    (ec) It certainly can work with the heritage monuments. My point was that we have hundreds of thousands of unillustrated articles of localities, streets, rivers, lakes, and other geographic features (admittedly very non-homogeneous around the world). Getting images illustrating these articles would be awesome, but I am afraid that it would be accompanied by getting many times more articles covering objects which have already been illustrated from all possible points at every time of the day and the year.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:52, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a quite different approach, something like Requested Pictures contest. It's true that Wiki Loves Something will bring images of objects that were pictured before, but it is hard to find a reasonable solution. On one hand, even already illustrated articles have very different quality of images (some are well documented, others have only low-quality photos), on the other hand, the distribution of "not-yet-pictured" objects is very far from homogenous, and in most big cities the remaining objects are of very limited interest. The only solution I am aware of is the one proposed by WLM Poland who have a special nomination for users having pictured most monuments that had no images before — NickK (talk) 17:57, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • For my point of view, competitions like WLM is only a way to support our projects and are not the main focus of our work. We ran WLM for 3 years (2 of them in Israel) - monuments is not integral part of our DNA, supporting Commons and Wikipedia are our focus. It's "easy" to continue to ran WLM, we have the lists, we know how to do it, and yes, we didn't covered all the Monuments yet. But we have other projects we can move to them and try. So yes, we can do both of them, and even others WL* kind of projects, but than we invest most of time and our budget on photos competitions, that as I said, from me point of view, are only a way to support our mission, not the mission itself. WMIL will have this discussion next week, but personally I think we should move to a new thing and invest most of our time next year in WLE, allowing us to present new thing, to create new partnerships, collect new kind of photos. If WLM will continue also next year we may join, but running it in a "basic" mode, mean only what needed for making this happen, not a huge festival like we had on the past 2 years.. --Itzike (talk) 15:38, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • In one hand, this concept is a little bit different from WLM or WLPA where the subjects and the scope is a part of the cultural heritage which (for me) is closer to the mission of Wikipedia. It is not clear for me (yet) what kind of objects should be in the contest (or where should we set the border between the 10 national park of Hungary (means altogether 10 objects) and the "every big trees" concept), and it can be a hard task to decide which images should disqualify (e.g. group of flowers or plants or a close-up sunset eligible for the contest or not). On the other hand, the scope of this project is part of our natural heritage, and more already existing Wikimedia-projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikivoyage) could use these images as illustration. Additionally I know several photographers who don't care about buildings and sculptures, but they love landscapes or nice plants etc., and with different scopes we could involve more people to our projects. Personally I don't have knowledge and connections on this area and I don't feel enough energy to undertake one more organization of contest for the next year beside work, family and other projects. If there was some volunteers who undertake the organization and coordination of this project in Hungary, I would support the team with my experiences. Samat (talk) 20:43, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    From our (Ukrainian) experience this year, we would sugest the "broad" description of natural heritage sites. For example, here there is an information about 209 natural areas protected at national level and 1953 natural areas of local interest, with (probably overlapping) list of Natura2000 sites. In my view, all those sites should represent interest to photographers, and some 2000 sites represents quite a good base for the contest. If natural areas of local interest are just "big trees" in Hungary, you may choose to deal only with areas protected at national level and Natura2000 sites. Concerning eligible pictures, you may focus on broad view and typical species, but I do not see significant problem if you will have some nice pictures of groups of flowers :) You define more accurate criteria of objects in the contest (other than broad views), but in general this should not be an issue — NickK (talk) 01:30, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Species[edit]

What about biological species? (Both flora and fauna) - the definition of objects is quite simple - just any species which are on any official list of species. DO they have any unique ID number? The problem might be with the size of database - but if there is any on-line database available - we could based the criteria on this list. (Wikispecies is probably not the best choice, but maybe?) Polimerek (talk) 08:57, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The risk is that we'd get many (too much ?) pictures of unidentified objects, resulting in a saturation of this kind of cats : Category:Unidentified plants. Symac (talk) 10:05, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Unlikely to be successful. Photographing wildlife is a special skill, not many people can do it, and the easy-to-catch species have been already photographed. We will either get thousands of pictures of a common sparrow, and/or a bunch of unidentified species.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:21, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It would have to be combines with identification of course (as with monuments). Also, you would need collaboration from some nature organization that can help with identification or confirming identification. It might bring valuable images - I'm not afraid of too many boring pictures. The same could be said for Wiki Loves Monuments. You don't organize a competition to get a lot of boring pictures, but they do come in, and at the same time the treasures also come in, and people get accustomed with editing/adding content. You could even combine it to some extent with natural prevervation areas. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:54, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I am afraid my argument still stands: All easily accessible species have been already documented on Commons. I am not an expert though.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:13, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Monuments[edit]

It probably won't set a new global record if we did this again, and those countries where we already have good coverage should probably try other things. But it is tried and tested, there are countries that we don't yet have good coverage, and there are countries where we haven't yet done this at all. So I would suggest we continue for one more year, but that individual countries only participate if their existing coverage of monuments is poor. Jonathan Cardy (talk) 08:03, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We don't need Records. But we have so much still missing. The Flagg ship has to sail also 2014. And then, all pictures of official monuments should be allowed, not only from "participating countries". Most of us don't need prizes, we don't need a Jury. We only want to make and upload our images within a month! Marcus Cyron (talk) 19:44, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree to Marcus. We do not need records, and we should allow monuments from all countries, even if those who do not participate "officially", but some people went there on holidays and took the photos.
Still I think that the contest is an important point to emphasize people concerning qualitiy of photos. I myself made a lot of photos in Cologne, which are not worth to be priced, because the monuments themselves seem to be boring, the situation (traffic signs, cars, rubbish containers) is mostly hard. But I like to see the work of other contributors, and I like to participate in the jury :) The contest is just the cream on top of the cake. --Nicola (talk) 19:54, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
While I don't want to reject your arguments, I feel I should add a short explanation /why/ not all countries participated (and why I think such an 'all countries' model will not work). As you can read in the philosophy section above, we have identified in the past that one of the success factors is that there is a very clear scope, and exhaustive list available of objects to be photographed. This lowers the threshold, and removed the exhausting discussions about whether or not images and articles should be deleted (especially offputting to newcomers). The availability of these lists (and Germany is the only example to the contrary here) was the leading reason why a country would or wouldn't participate besides having the basic infrastructure (jury, prizes, banner translations) which didn't cost a lot of effort in comparison. We could add the UNESCO list of course, but this would barely address the issue - it would only be symbolic. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:16, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to add that another problem of non-participating countries is a lack of volunteers to identify and sort photos. While bots currently manage at least basic sorting into categories based on lists on local Wikipedias and volunteeers are usually able to identify whether a photo in question displays a monument or not, it would be much harder without local organisers. For example, a user having several hundreds of photos from his holidays in Zagreb can effectively upload them as «Central Zagreb 159.jpg» with Category:Zagreb, but this would be hardly beneficial for the project: if no one is able to identify the monument pictured and move the photo to the related category / add to relevant articles, these photos will be most likely useless and just increase our statistics of uncategorised images — NickK (talk) 01:23, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Map of the 52 participating countries in Wiki Loves Monuments 2013
The Global North (in green) and the Global South (in grey).

I think our (my) goal with Wiki Loves Monuments is to get a better coverage of this subject in Wikipedia. We noticed we had so less pictures of monuments, while it is our cultural heritage. In the past four years we have made big steps towards a better coverage of the subject, but still so many monuments do not have any picture and still so many countries are missing. (As I wrote before:) In the 2013 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments 52 countries and areas participated in Wiki Loves Monuments. Large parts on the map are coloured red, but also large parts are white. The world has 195 international recognized independent states, but has also many dependent territories. Only less than a quarter of these countries and territories participated in Wiki Loves Monuments.

  • The largest area that isn't covered is Africa. In a few countries Wiki Loves Monuments has been organized, but in most of them we have do not have any lists of cultural monuments on Wikipedia and no participation in the contest. Only in 7 of the 54 independent states Wiki Loves Monuments has been organized and we miss much of the African cultural heritage.
  • With the 2013 edition the first Arab states discovered Wiki Loves Monuments and made their first steps in the contest. Only in 5 of the 22 states of that region Wiki Loves Monuments has been organized. But the interest in the contest is growing in the Arab world thanks to the first pioneers in 2013 who bridged the cultural gap.
  • In 2013 the area of the Caucasus two of three countries started with Wiki Loves Monuments, including the area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Only Georgia did not participate.
  • In Central Asia there is no participation at all and we do little know about their cultural heritage.
  • In other parts of Asia the participation is fragile. Several countries indicated the wish to participate, but only a part of them were ready to do so. Especially the countries of southeast Asia are missing, while they do have a rich cultural history which deserves more attention.
  • In Oceania none of the 14 countries and 13 territories participated (besides Hawaii as part of the United States contest). The whole cultural heritage of the island nations are missing.
  • Besides the three largest countries, almost all the countries of North America (including the Caribbean region) are missing with their cultural heritage. From the 23 countries and more than 14 dependencies and other territories in North America, only 6 participated: Aruba, Canada, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama and the United States. The rich cultural heritage of this area asks to be mapped.
  • In South America the participation began in 2012 with 3 countries and grew in 2013 to 6 participating countries out of the 12 countries and 3 dependencies on the continent. We also explored in 2013 Antarctica and the Falkland Islands. What do we know about the cultural heritage of Brazil and French Guiana?
  • In Europe most countries have participated in Wiki Loves Monuments. The most empty part of this continent is in the southeastern part with the Balkans, Cyprus and Turkey. Other countries that are missing are Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland and most of the small states: Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City and Malta. Another point of attention are the areas of Greenland, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, the Faroe Islands and the Åland Islands.
  • Around the world are a lot of other islands and dependencies with a small cultural heritage we have almost no knowledge of.

In the first four editions of Wiki Loves Monuments we focussed on the participation of those countries who were able to organize a local contest with lists of monuments, a jury and prizes. In all those countries all the volunteers did a great job and did a lot of work to make this event happen. But I think our responsibility goes beyond only the area where we live. The Wikimedia movement should focus in the coming years on all those other countries around the world to enable them to participate in one of the most simple way of participation (with uploading pictures). We should reach out to those who have more difficulties in participating and making it easier for them to join the world's movement of expansion of free knowledge.

To me it would be a pity to stop now from several countries that they missed the opportunity to participate in 2013 and are willing to organize in 2014. Some only started in 2013 and do want to continue. As it took four years to get as big as it is now, to me it seems that we organize a Wiki Loves Monuments in 2014, or if we don't we have nothing really to replace it as it is not that easy to start a new contest from ground up. That requires some time, much time, so it can be possible to organize both a new subject as Wiki Loves Monuments in 2014.

Another alternative is that there is no global Wiki Loves Monuments, but that the local teams can organize a local competition. It would be really really much disappointing for many countries if there is no contest and also no possibility to organize it easily, if there is no Wiki Loves Monuments in 2014, nor global nor local, it would be a big missed opportunity to enrich Wikipedia. Romaine (talk) 05:28, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Romaine. I am with you, as usual :) --Nicola (talk) 16:39, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Romaine, this is clear water from a wiki lover. As NickK pointed above, there are three groups of countries:
  • WLM mature countries. They may want to try another thematic focus. This does not interfere with a new WLM edition but it can lay the groundwork for future initiatives.
  • WLM newby countries. They may want another round. The key point is if it is possible to organize an international team.
  • WLM potentially new countries. They may need an international support, i.e. an international Francophone group supporting one local user interested or focussed on some dependencies. This is harder to organize but it is a way to reach the Global South.
--V.Riullop (talk) 11:55, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In Hungary, list of monuments is not published, and if you would like to know about a building is it a monument or not, you have to pay for this information to the government. Even if you had this information, you can't use or publish it because of the Hungarian law and the database rights. WLM Hungary's three-years history started in 2011, when we could get the list of the monuments from the government with very strict terms (e.g. we shouldn't publish it) and we got permissions using it only during the contest. In the next year we tried to get it under free license, but (partly because there was some changes in the governmental entity) after several month discussion in the last minute we received an answer about complete rejection and we had to withdraw our participation in the contest. This year (after more than one year discussion) we could arrange a pilot project, where we got small part (1/10th) of the monuments list under free license. I hope that our successful pilot project this year will persuade the government about the values of our cooperation, and we can get the full list of monument next year. Therefore I really plan to organize WLM in the following year: I wouldn't like to miss this opportunity, lose three years work and cut off the slowly and with a lot of effort built out relations, connections. Samat (talk) 18:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In Austria, we have a coverage of about 90% of images needed to illustrate the lists. Taking the other 10 % is getting harder. Objects may be difficult to find, far away, only accessible on special dates, etc. What about shifting the focus of WLM from the shear mass production of images (their number is the most recognized measurement, it seems almost the only measurement), to filling the gaps? At least for countries almost complete. --Herzi Pinki (talk) 08:10, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is a good idea, if countries where the coverage is already quite high, try to fill the gaps. And maybe, WLM could move from quantity to a quality concept ("upload new images for objects where we already have images, if it has better in quality or special for some reason"). Samat (talk) 20:21, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think that Wiki Loves Monuments needs to continue. I live in Spain, a country that has been -apparently- very extensively and intensively photographed. But I can find hundreds of monuments that haven't been. That's not only true for castles or hermitories up in the mountains or in very remote settings. In the last years my wife and I have taken photos of monuments that can be reached from my city (Valencia, population almost a million) just driving for half an hour. No trekking, no climbing, you can park just beside. And they still hadn't been pictured. Of course you'll have hundreds of pictures of the Pisa Tower or the Prado Museum. That cannot be helped. But if we can get some images of the parrish church of Fuente la Reina (Castellón), these would be the very first ones. And the same is true for literally hundreds of places, some of which are deteriorating fast. So it is in everybody's interest that such activities as WLM are promoted. A change in focus may be required. I don't think we should aim for the cutest and most technically perfect picture of, say, Tower Bridge or the Kremlin. It would be more beneficial to have pictures -even if not so nice ones- of the awfull lot of monuments still missing from our collection. That's why I think we should keep on. B25es (talk) 18:04, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the UK we will be running WLM again in 2014. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:16, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Michael, I would recommend you to sign up on the WLM 2014 project page. Are you already subscribed to the WLM mailing list? --Beat Estermann (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, already done. I just posted here for information. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:42, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Public Art[edit]

Well - it might speed up GLAM cooperation - if the local teams would be able to establish good links with art museums - at least several in each country it could work - althougl probably in not such a scale like in case of WLM. But - it could be part of WLM - just as I WW competition was this year. Polimerek (talk) 08:49, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think that this format will more correspond to Wiki Loves Art (similar to the one held in 2009 in the Netherlands). However, there will be a problem with a low threshold for participating: in any case a number of partner museums would be limited, and probably several museums in each country is not enough for a national contest. This is, however, a good idea for a GLAM project, probably it is worth discussing within GLAM community — NickK (talk) 16:49, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Please make a clear distinction between Wiki Loves Art (large scale collaboration with museums that provide access and special authorisation to photograph Public Domain objects) and Wiki Loves Public Art (photographing art in the public space - statues etc.). Effeietsanders (talk) 16:56, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@NickK: Lack of FOP is annoying, but it shouldn't prevent a WLPA contest from being run in any country. There are hundreds or thousands of PD public art elements even in non FOP countries.--Pere prlpz (talk) 12:50, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • My experience with WLPA Barcelona that we ran in May as a pilot:
    • The concept is easy to understand for previous participants in WLM: street artworks instead of buildings. Some photographers of WLM joined WLPA and new ones participated in WLM in September.
    • It is very hard to find national registers. The concept has a more urban approach with catalogues only in some cities. On the other hand, regular Wikipedians are motivated to find information for a possible list of their city. It could be a nice project with librarians.
    • Even in a country with FoP, there are border line cases: is it located indoors or outdoors, public domain or copyrighted? It is necessary some knowledge of local legislation about FoP. We revised all listed atworks and marked them as PD, FoP or not-sure. "Not-sure" cases were out of contest. --V.Riullop (talk) 12:45, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      Well, there are countries having strictly no FoP, neither outdoor nor indoor, and relatively desperate copyright rules. Typically in any post-Soviet country without FOP most of public art works in PD are either pre-Soviet monuments to "neutral" writers and artists (we can probably find a hundred of them per country, as all monuments to anti-communists were destroyed by the Soviets) or monuments to Lenin and other communist activists erected in 1920s-1940s (we can probably find a thousand nationwide if they were not destroyed, but most have little to no artistic value). All "interesting" or "creative" monuments were erected starting from 1960s, and thus are not in PD unless a sculptor provides an OTRS permission. Moreover, most of PD monuments are already pictured several times, in particular during WLM as most of them are part of cultural heritage. I cannot speak for all countries, but at least in post-Soviet ones (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan etc.) WLPA has a very limited potential: for example, Lithuanian capital Vilnius has about a hundred artworks, but only 6 of them are definitely PD — NickK (talk) 16:39, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with most what I read above. For me, WLM was not just a means to get pictures but especially a way to activate existing Wikipedians, bring them together and let them work together in real life, and to reach out to new people. Also, having a topic to go to the press. The structure with the monuments list was maybe the key element to make that work because it made participating not only easier but also showed that pre-work has been done by others, in the Dutch case: that the official agency for monuments is an active part of it. The international concept made it easy to adopt it as a kind of franchise in the single countries.

I am afraid that in those countries with several years of WLM these goals are not easy to achieve again and again; the contest is no novelty any longer. The general concept seems to me still useful, but one should offer a new subject. So that some countries can go on with WLM, and others with the new thing. Maybe call it "Wiki Loves Monuments and [the other thing]" to use the same title for all countries that what to participate. What should be our utmost concern is the question how to reach goals with limited volunteers resources. Ziko (talk) 14:06, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In Hungary, there is no central catalog of public art works (at least I don't know about it), therefore I was skeptic about this idea first, but during Wikimania I decided that I will try to find out something. The concept is close to WLM, and collection of public art works is an other important part of our common cultural heritage. Then I've found this project. It has a quite large and active volunteer community with some professionals (they publish pages only after a peer review), and in the last 7 years they collected about 20 thousand objects with detailed description, images, history and so on, and it is the largest collection of public art works in Hungary now. The project and the page is not under free license (and they not plan to do so), but after three month discussion they decided to start a cooperation with Wikimedia for a photo contest. The contract is under preparation now, but we could get the list of the objects with ID, coordinates and basic information. After this nice option I plan to organize this contest in the next year, and I would ask counties around Hungary to do the same. There are some sculptures and other public art works in their collection from the surrounding countries with Hungarian connection, and I would be very happy to receive images of them as well. And organizing something similar, parallel, together in more countries is more fun, has more effect and nicer results. Samat (talk) 19:30, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your idea of surrounding countries, but given this and similar FOP cases, Ukraine will hardly be able to participate in WLPA next year. Sorry, but probably we will be able to work on it once Ukraine gets FOP — NickK (talk) 02:04, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Your Project[edit]

It's inevitable that WLMonuments will continue in some form for a long time. From above there seems to be lots of ideas on how to expand the scope, but there are also complaints about burnout or that it is getting too big and cannot continue to expand. My feeling is that it is too big, that there has been too much emphasis on records and size just for the sake of size. The solution is to take what we've learned from WLM and apply it to a series of smaller projects. We do not need to decide on what these projects will be now. Rather, let people who have their own ideas and organizations propose projects - of any size - and then "WLYP" helps them with the organization and technology to do it. For example, individual countries can organize their own WLM events how they would like to - perhaps in June for a month, or in January (Australia and other Southern Hemisphere countries?), for a month or perhaps just for a week, or even for just one city over one weekend. Other topics could be done as well, public art, libraries, courthouses, railroads, ships, parks, wildlife, cemeteries, religious buildings, villages in Poland, etc. etc. - anything that could be used in an article in Wikipedia.

Breaking down what WLM has done, it seems that we have mainly focused on technology:

  • Banner advertising
  • Formatting lists
  • Uploading software
  • Categorizing
  • Placing photos in lists and articles
  • Judging photos

I'm not sure that every small or large project needs to have all of these, but most will need most of these, and we have the expertise to show independent organizers how to use them. So WLYP can help them get organized (and let them know how many volunteers they will need), introduce them to the required steps and technologies, and send them off to do their own thing. Small and fun may be a lot better than big and record setting, but if something gets big, that's good too.

So I guess I'm calling for something like a WikiProject, probably on Commons, with some volunteers who will write up general procedures, standardize software for more general use, and give advice. As long as people want to have special photo projects, we'll continue to offer advice, and to keep things going let the people receiving the advice know that they should be prepared to help "WLYP" with the benefit of knowledge that they have gained, and give advice to others when their project is done. BTW a better name than WLYP is needed - any advice appreciated. Smallbones (talk) 05:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Old Images[edit]

One of my old idea to organize a competition aiming to collect archive images from private people from the 20th century (in the period where copyright is still valid: roughly between the first world war and a ninetieths), or even from earlier times. Every family has some packages of old images (in the cases or in the loft), and these images typically never will be published or reachable, after some generations they will be perished. If we could collect only very small part of this extremely large treasure would be a nice result. I planned to organize this competition since 2008, but it is still not happened. For me it is very nice to see the old cities, landscapes, clothes, social situations and so on, how they changed during the decades, or old objects (building, landscapes, anything else) which are already not exist or changed significantly. It is not easy, because the original photographers are usually dead and there are more inheritors, and many times nobody knows who took the picture; investigate this copyright issues are very-very hard or in many cases impossible. And I don't know, is it reasonable (has advantages) to organize it on international level or not (maybe not). Many countries are in better position because the archive institutes more open than in Hungary, in some cases these archives are already under free license, even reachable from Wikimedia Commons. But I wanted to share my idea here, after ideas of other photo contests :) Samat (talk) 21:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A great idea — but a tricky one as well. We were thinking of doing something similar in Ukraine, and we had an enthusiast (not me), but we have encountered two problems:
  1. Copyright issues. It is true that photographers are difficult to identify, and US laws are unfortunately hostile (120 years for anonymous unpublished works). Unless a user is sure that his / her father / grandfather / other ancestor owned a photo camera and this user is sure that photos were taken by this ancestor, these photos probably cannot be uploaded to Commons
  2. Usefulness of such images for encyclopaedic projects. It is clear that before digital cameras were widespread, most people could not afford taking a lot of photos. Thus a majority of people, except some enthusiasts, have mostly family photos in their collection, which may be useful only if they display interesting social situations and are accurately described (we hardly need dozens of images of young unidentified people in summer camps in 1980s). It may be interesting to reach those who have a number of useful pictures of objects, but we need to find a more precise definition of the scope for this project.
It would be great to work on such project to motivate ordinary people (not just archives — which is more a GLAM than Wiki Loves Something activity) to contribute, but I am not sure we can effectively overcome these two problems — NickK (talk) 02:25, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Other discussion[edit]

Maybe there are some countries interested in participating this year (2014). I've created Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2014/Participating countries and you could put your country there. Thanks and regards. --Millars (talk) 20:29, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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