Commons talk:European Science Photo Competition 2015/Rules and prizes

Language limitation

In the rules is statement about minimal languages used in the description of the photo, namely "Every photo must have a description at least in English". But there are many people in Europe with very weak knowledge of English (or another non-mother tongue) and they will have problems to participate. They can try to describe the picture by their poor English but the result will not be nice, in many cases even non understandable. Or they may try to use machine translator but the supposed result is not high too...

As this is European (so non UK / USA) competition, I recommend to change the rule from "at least in English" to "at least in one official (non-minority) European language". After electing winers of local competition can local organisers add translation to English too, for international jury. But we should not force every participant to do this - (reasonable) active knowledge of English is not so broadly spread like many tends to think. --KuboF (talk) 17:46, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

I am afraid that it may be too difficult, as translating the description of the photo in this competition can be a disaster... --アンタナナ 05:01, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't think it would be a good idea, to make it super easy to participate. We don't need random images. If person can't even write the English description, then how can he or she work in the field of science nowadays? The ones dealing with the topic should be the ones who know the terminology at the best. If they want, then they can work it out.

Setting the translation to the shoulders of local organizers would be too much in my opinion. Kruusamägi (talk) 07:37, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

License limitations

In the rules is statement "Images have to be published under CC-BY-SA license". I think, that we should not limit our participants to the most restrictive of free CC licenes. On the contrary, I think, that if participant likes to publish his or her picture under CC-0, it is absolutely fine and support worthy. So the new statement can be "Images have to be published under CC-BY-SA or less restrictive license". --KuboF (talk) 17:51, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

 Support the uploader can choose the license. it makes sense --アンタナナ 04:58, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree, that other licenses are also ok, and don't mind the change. The idea was to make choosing license as easy as possible and no choice is an easy way out. Not to mention that this BY-part of the license might be of great interest to very many participants. WLM can work with one license, can't ESPC do so just as well? Kruusamägi (talk) 07:37, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

our WLM uploader has the defaulf license, but the uploader may choose other free license --アンタナナ 08:39, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Preferred file formats

"Preferred file format is jpg (or .ogg for video files)." I think it should be clarified that .jpg is for photos, while for actually images (like computer generated stuff) .png or possibly .gif are preferable. We don't want nice graphs and stuff to be jpeg compressed. --Base (talk) 19:59, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

 Support --アンタナナ 04:59, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I was planning to add some specifications there. Please feel free to make any changes you find suitable. Kruusamägi (talk) 07:37, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Scope

What is the scope of this competition? Estonian photos uploaded in previous years and Ukrainian photos uploaded during this month suggest that absolutely any photo and any dataset is eligible for the "Science" Photo Competition, because everything can be related to science of some sort. Many of the photos uploaded in this competition will actually belong to Wiki Loves Monuments and especially Wiki Loves Earth. What is the purpose of duplicating these already existing and much better organized competitions, where each photo receives its unique monument ID that can be later used for finding the images and organizing them? --Alexander (talk) 20:05, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

The competition does not duplicate others. It's just that some authors have no grasp of what to upload. Many images go to ineligible category. I for one am glad the competition happened, because some of the scientists started to share their work, which was actually the point of it all. There's a lot of extra that is frankly unsuitable, but who cares if we get some good scientific images as a result of the competition? And maybe someone would want to write an article about a species of myxomycetes they uploaded but which is not written yet? who knows. --Helixitta (t.) 20:26, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, the question is how users should understand which images are eligible and which are not. You have more than 200 images that are marked as "obviously ineligible", but no eligibility criteria exist, at least not on the international level (I have not checked Ukrainian pages in detail). --Alexander (talk) 20:39, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, it's all about image description. For example, a picture of a botanical or zoological object can go both ways: if it is properly described with the species name, habitat etc. it is valid, if it says "pretty flower" — it is not valid. The point is, the illegible images mustn't require additional experts in zoology or botany to identify the objects that are depicted there (we have a lot of photos that are in categories "Unidentified something"). Then there are obvious cases of images of streets/cities/monuments (the ones that would go to Wiki Loves Monuments competition, and here I believe people got confused, because I really do not know how some images could be uploaded as "scientific"). And I personally would count out medical equipment. And also there are some blurred images, that are ruled out because one can't see clearly what's pictured there. That's basically it, but the line is not very well defined. --Helixitta (t.) 20:31, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

For example, this SEM image is considered eligible, although its description is absolutely weird. On the other hand, this ineligible image contains a decent description saying what type of plant it is and providing a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. I am really not sure what else you expect from non-experts, and it would be strange to rely only on botanical experts (who are few) for this kind of photos.

More generally, I think that 301 ineligible photos out of 727 is a big, big fail of explaining people which images should be uploaded and how they should be described. Please, make it clear if only experts are supposed to participate. If the contest is open for everyone, provide detailed guidelines on descriptions. We do a lot of preparatory work for WLE and WLM, and it is naive to think that a successful competition can run without such work by just saying: "Please, upload pictures related to science".

Lastly, it is fairly clear that no single person can be expert in both microscopy images and flowers, and I don't understand how such a competition makes sense without organizers representing all relevant subjects and areas of expertise. --Alexander (talk) 22:09, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Selection criteria

I could not find any information on the selection criteria. Who will choose the winners and how? What is more important, aesthetics or scientific value? Do the national and international organizers have experts in every area of science in order to assess scientific value of images? Who are these experts?

If scientific value is less important than aesthetics (which seems to be the case), is not it opposite to the very idea of science? --Alexander (talk) 20:05, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Scientific descriptions?

I checked the image, which is labeled as "fully suitable for the European Science Photo Competition". Its description reads as "3D AFM image of edge of ultrathin polymer film". I find this a horrible example of what a scientific description should not be, because this description provides zero information on the material studied: what is the polymer? how was it prepared? what is the substrate?

What is the goal of uploading such images? What kind of science are you going to illustrate with an image showing unknown something measured under unknown conditions?

This goes along the same lines as multiple SEM images lacking the length scale, which is a must for every microscopy image. And these images are considered as best images from the Estonian competition-2013... Sigh. --Alexander (talk) 20:05, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Oh. This one is really bad as an example. Shoot, now I get it why they are uploading images with such lousy descriptions.
But anyway, we have a template that is added as a greeting with an example of a description and another one which is added if there are problems. The template is a bit messy to use, but still...
Anyway, what I'm trying to say, it's been written at every turn about the necessity of a good description (though now I see that some examples lacked one in turn), but if the authors don't see it or are unwilling to add information, I don't know what could be done about it. --Helixitta (t.) 20:18, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

My random check shows that most of the descriptions are unacceptable. The one that you quoted is good indeed, but is it the only good example? And why isn't it linked from the main page? --Alexander (talk) 20:35, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

FAQ and welcome template

Hi. I've added a new question to FAQ page. If you can think of any other questions new users might want to ask, please add them as well.
The FAQ page is delivered to every participant via this template. You can adapt the template for your own country. We've waited for half of the contest to pass so that there was a list of participants and mass-delivered the template. Afterwards we (well, I, mostly) just delivered it to new participants one by one as they contributed to the competition. --Helixitta (t.) 14:22, 29 October 2015 (UTC)