Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2020

2020 special awards discussion

We already scheduled special awards in 2020 before the crisis became obvious. The international team is planning to organize two special regional awards (to be finalized in August) for underrepresented regions and possibly one award for some 'innovation category' (such as drones or 3D representation). Finally, we're considering a special award for UNESCO world heritage outside of participating countries (this would cover an upload period in November 2020). Thoughts about this are welcome below! Effeietsanders (talk) 00:01, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Regional awards

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Innovative award

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World Heritage Award

I like very much the idea of a special award for World Heritage. The list of world heritage is clear and countries without WLM or without affiliates can participate in this competition. After discussion with some friends and members of the planned Wiki World Heritage UG, I think the best way to organize this (without excluding some countries) is to think the world as a one big Country. Photographers will be invited to upload their photos regardless their country or the country of the WH. This of course will leads to have many photos for the same country and probably many photos for the same WH that's why I suggest to have a pre-selection to keep only 3 photos per country to participate in the final selection. We can also classify the photos in sub-categories. --Yamen (talk) 19:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Categorization suggestion

I totally agree with Yamen. World Heritage sites belong to the whole humanity regardless of geographic regions, therefore it would better to have one global contest. And in order foster diversity and facilitate evaluation , we can categorize the photos following the sites nature. I suggest 3 main categories: Buildings / Complexes/ Urban fabrics.

I also suggest to award a special prize for World Heritage in Danger, to contribute in raising awareness about these sites. Thank you for the brilliant idea :) -- Nassima Chahboun (talk) 21:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks both for the suggestion. There is a few reasons to not have the special award overlap with national competitions: 1) if they overlap, that would mean that you would run into trouble with advertising the category in countries that just had WLM the month before. 2) It would make it especially hard to communicate the time of the competition, as different countries run in different months. How can you explain that uploading the Taj Mahal in one month does participate in this special award, and not in another? 3) There is a fair amount of resistance in a number of countries against asking people to photograph world heritage, because that is typically the heritage already best documented. This is a fight I don't want to add to my list this year. 4) I was hoping to add this special award at the same level as the national competitions. That would allow us to nominate the best pictures for the international awards too. This would however mean that we need to make sure that there is no overlap - otherwise pictures can compete twice in some countries, and that is unfair. 5) I see this especially as encouragement for countries that don't yet have the capacity to organize a national competition. By including the photo-heavy countries in the category, you will disadvantage them and take away the equity component of this award. Some of these may be possible to resolve, but probably not in time for this year. Note that if we want UNESCO to advertise for this, we need to set up everything *now*, and get it translated as soon as possible.

I like the ideas to arrive at more nuance with categories etc, but that also adds another layer of complexity. I would suggest to first run a simple competition, and then see for next year what adjustments could make it better, if we want to repeat it. We could definitely think about jury instructions that encourage diversity across countries (I would not mold that as formal criteria, but rather as soft criteria - mostly for practical reasons).

Very practically, I would keep it simple: consider 'rest of the world' as one big country. All UNESCO cultural sites (not the purely natural ones) can participate, but I would also be happy to accept any sites from the tentative list if that helps inclusion. Effeietsanders (talk) 22:26, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

سعيد جدا لمجرد المشاركة قيس البصري (talk) 22:47, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

كيف اشترك ف المسابقة Saad abdalla Mohamed khlifa (talk) 09:23, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Important announcement for 2020 Wiki Loves Monuments organizers

I would like to thank everyone who weighed in on what Wiki Loves Monuments should look like in 2020. It will be a special year - originally we thought it would be special, because it's the 10th international edition. It turns out, that it will also be an especially challenging year to organize a photo competition.

Countries around the world are dealing with the consequences of this ravaging pandemic, and many national organizers have already been wondering what approach to take this year. We organized office hours about this a few weeks ago, and as international team, we took the time to digest this. I wanted to take this email to give hopefully a bit more clarity about how we will organize Wiki Loves Monuments this year.

Responsibility for national organizers: First of all, I would like to emphasize that the international team coordinates the national competitions: we are not qualified to tell you exactly how to organize your competition. The situation is rapidly evolving, and different in each country. National teams are best placed to decide whether and how to organize a competition in your country.  We will try to help set an international framework, and assist in the exchange of best practices. We expect that national organizers will follow the guidance and regulations set by their national governments and health authorities. Note that funding and WMF affiliate recognition may come with additional guidance/requirements.

Extended timeline: National organizers have the opportunity to choose a different range of dates for their national competition. You can pick any range of 30 or 31 days within the period September-November 2020 as your upload dates. That means that one country does not have to use the same upload dates as another. This hopefully allows more flexibility for rapid changes in a national situation, but also for national organizers that currently don't have the capacity to organize a competition due to personal circumstances, to push the competition a little later in the year. However, uploads after November 30 will not be accepted. The jury deadline will be January 2, 2021 for all countries. A simple timeline has been published on Commons, and will be updated there. Other documentation may be outdated - feel free to update.

Exchange of best practices: There will be plenty of national challenges this year. I created an exchange page to share some best practices (but you can also keep using our mailing list). How to organize a competition when there are government restrictions? How do you make sure that not too many people show up? What kind of in-person events may be responsible, if permitted by local government? How to organize online upload workshops? This may be especially a good place to exchange some good blog posts and communications that inform participants on how to behave. I put up a few empty headers, and would love it if people help flesh out tips based on their experiences.

Special awards in 2020: We already scheduled special awards in 2020 before the crisis became obvious. The international team is planning to organize two special regional awards (to be finalized in August) for underrepresented regions and possibly one award for some 'innovation category' (such as drones or 3D representation). Finally, we're considering a special award for UNESCO world heritage outside of participating countries (this would cover an upload period in November 2020). Thoughts about this are welcome on the main talk page on Commons.

Please don't forget to register your participation or interest to participate here: Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2020/Participating countries#Participating.

I'm sure that this won't be the last email on this topic, but invite you to ask questions if you have any. You can do that on the Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list, or on this talk page. On behalf of the international team, Effeietsanders (talk) 00:09, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Link to the International Homepage

Just checking the links on our national Page. Will the the website of the contest International Homepage still be updated to 2020? --Wuselig (talk) 10:38, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Somebody seems to be working on the page, but as of August 31 11:37 it still looks very 2019ish. Since the preparation and also the information about the contest starts way before September 1, we should strive for 2021 to get things sorted earlier. --Wuselig (talk) 09:21, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree. What about the statistics tool? On the /Tools page is a version of the tool from 2018.--Beko (talk) 06:10, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

The currently maintained stats tool is here: https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/

I'm updating things on the website whenever i find some spare time. Each year we want to do it earlier, but end up doing it last minute - we simply need more hands on the international team that work on documentation/PR, I'm afraid :) Effeietsanders (talk) 20:38, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Announcement: jury members

After getting feedback both on- and offlist, we arrived at the following: the Montage developers will make a page available to each jury coordinator, that they can copy and paste to a wiki page to share their process settings easily. That way it's easy to be transparent. At some point in the future, we will likely make this public by default.

I do express the expectation that each national coordinator will publish their jury members (either real life name or username). It may well be that we ask you to submit this list of jurors when you submit your nominees (although we will not publish it on your behalf, that is your responsibility). Effeietsanders (talk) 22:50, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

request to explain about judgment

I started to participant in Wikimedia since last year and I very liked the idea behind of donating pictures to the world. I donated a lot of FP to Wikimedia before WLM 2020. I Participated in the WLM with more than 10 pictures. I opposed with one of the pictures nominated by Poco_a_poco , and I supported another picture of him. But in this picture I opposed with the sky exposure and he told me “It's in fact that you are not applying the same criteria to judge my images as you do with those from others. But don't worry, you can expect from me also rigorous (but fair not this kind of bullshit) reviews.” he was the judge of Iran WLM in that time and easily all of my pictures expect one of them removed!!!!! this picture selected as 4th picture. The name of the photographer of this picture is a site. After nominating this picture to be removed, the process stopped and yet we don’t know the name of photographer of this weak picture taken by an smart phone.

The 9th picture of Iran WLM is just a Geological phenomenon and obviously not a historical monument made by human. 

The 10th picture of Iran WLM is just taken from a normal wooden bridge and this bridge is not in the Iran's monuments list too. You can see The Tal wharf in this picture. 3 pictures of 10, featured wrongly. how can this possible????!!!!! I wanted to rejudging with fare and justice. But LilyOfTheWest said to me this is impossible and I was disappointed. I changed my way to selling my works instead uploading them in Wikimedia and I want to delete my own pictures from Wikimedia. I think accessing to my pictures by everyone in the world is against to my new way and it can hurts my commercial image. I want to explain about this judgment with logical reasons or accept my request of removing my pictures in Wikimedia. Yours sincerely Amir Pashaei.--Amir Pashaei (talk) 13:35, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Amir Pashaei, I've been one of the jurors for Wiki Loves Monuments International 2020. Although I don't know any details about the judging of the local contest in your country, I take your concern very seriously and would like to learn more about it. Would you be willing to have a call with me, so I can get a better understanding of the issue at hand? Please feel free to send me an email. All the best, --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 04:04, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello dear Mr Schulenburg. I said every thing. this is simple. all of my pictures expect one of them removed easily!!!!! 3 pictures selected as 10 final pictures wrongly. LilyOfTheWest supposed to answer me but until now I didn't receive any reasonable answer. I demand to answer here. last letter writing got nowhere.--Amir Pashaei (talk) 06:40, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

@Frank Schulenburg Sorry for my comment here, but I think Amir Pashaei's outrage is legitimate. His pictures are outstanding and usually get most number of votes in FP's, so I was personally shocked to see non of his pictures chosen for Iran's Wiki Loves Monuments 2020. --Gnosis (talk) 04:47, 25 March 2021 (UTC)