Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Concept

Wiki Loves Monuments is a public photo contest around monuments, organized by Wikimedia chapters. In September 2011 it will be organized in several European countries. The contest is organized in a federative fashion, so the details on a national level might differ from country to country. The basic concept is that people are invited to upload images of monumental objects under a free license for usage on Wikipedia. We want to try to get complete lists of these monuments on Wikipedia, including photos - giving a great and unique overview of the cultural heritage in a country.

Concept Guidelines

The contest is organized in a federative fashion. That means that each participating group/chapter organizes their own contest, and each of these contests is part of a bigger, European, contest. Each organizing group has a lot of freedom in how to organize it exactly in their own territory (to make the contests compatible with each other there are some general rules we would like to keep constant), but there are several recommendations on this page which you might want to consider, mainly based on last years experiences in the Netherlands.

That does not mean you're out there all by yourself! If we can help each other, we should - but it is impossible to organize everything centrally because of the huge workload and the country specificities.

European Contest

The European contest will be jury based competition for the best photo of a monument where a European jury will select winners from nominees taken from the winners of the national quality contests.

Rules (Europe)

• Photo has to be self taken and self uploaded
• Upload in September only (to Commons, but also to Flickr if applicable)
• License defaults to CC-BY-SA 3.0
• Monument on the photo should be identified with identifier (locally determined)
• E-mail address uploader has to be confirmed
• Nominations by national contests (10 nominations per country)
• The n'th prize winner will be the n'th person allowed to pick a prize

Judging criteria

• Technical quality (sharpness, use of light, perspective, color hue, megapixels etc, see Commons:Image guidelines)
• Originality
• Usefulness for Wikipedia

Jury composition

striving for:

• 2 professional photographers/photo editors
• 2 heritage specialists
• 3 Wikimedians
• Facilitator (non-voting)

National contest

The exact rules for the national contests will have to be laid out by the organization for each country in their local language. There are some basic principles we should all adhere to and there are some recommendations.

Requirements

• The contest runs from 1 until 30 September 2011.
• The jury result should be ready by a certain deadline (probably early or in the middle of November) - exact date to be determined in May.
• All participating photos should be made by participants and licensed under a free Creative Commons license acceptable on Wikimedia Commons.
• There will have to be some kind of structured lists of admissible monuments. These lists will need to contain, at the start of the contest, at least an identifier for each entry and a way to locate the object (i.e. address and/or geo-coordinates). For more information about these lists, see #Object lists
• There will be some kind of awards for the best participating photo in each country.

Recommendations

A lot more detailed recommendations are available through the post-mortem 2010 on Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments/post mortem

• Organize local events if you have the capacity for that.
• Organize both a classification around quantity (number of objects submitted) as quality (best photo)

Organizational recommendations

As mentioned before, all national contests are expected to run their own organization. Of course some things can be coordinated, but it would be unfair to give the impression that others will take over this from you. There are some basic things that each country has to take care of one way or the other. These are the most important:

Partners

See also, the 2010 Post Mortem for more suggestions

See also Partner suggestions for a bit more detail.

Partners will be important to run the contest. Basically three types of partners can be imagined:

• Governmental partner for the structured data: you will need to compile lists of monuments, and it is very helpful if the government can provide their official list with as much detail as possible. Their cooperation can make the project extra useful because people will most likely find mistakes in the original lists that can be corrected.
• Publicity partners: partners that can help you with getting the word out, reaching specific audiences and media. Their cooperation can give you credibility.
• Sponsors: They can provide you with awards and possibly cover some of the costs of the event. Whether this is required probably depends on the specific local situation.

If you have trouble with contacting the partners or the right people, please get in touch with Maarten, he might be able to help you through our European partners!

Object lists

Each country should pick one Wikipedia to be leading (easy for the Netherlands, not trivial for countries like Switzerland). Possible fields:

• unique id - The unique id of the monument by which it can be identified (required)
• name - The name of the monument (highly recommended)
• description - A description of the monument (optional)
• type - The type of monument (optional)
• address - Address of the monument (recommended)
• municipality - The municipality in which the monument is located (recommended)
• lat - The latitude (highly recommended)
• lon - The longitude (highly recommended)
• image - Image of the monument (required)

The fields can of course be localized.

Database

• • Database (MaD)

Communication

All national organizations are expected to set up a local website in the local language(s) with at least the following information:

• explanation of the contest concept
• explanation of the rules
• definition of the classifications (quantity/quality) and awards
• contact details (possibly link to wikipage) for both participants and press
• explanation of upload details
• explanation on how to find local monuments and the unique ID etc.

Approaching potential participants, make use of existing communities and platforms! Partners can be valuable here too. A lot can be done with free publicity.

Jury

Make sure the jury is a bit diverse. For the rest, a lot of freedom. Mix of photographers and wikimedians is advisable. Try to get them in real life together in one room to make the final decisions, but before that, some preparatory work has to be done to get the selection to some 100 images.

Technical

Most technical facilities will become available in a centralized fashion. Details will be worked out later, this is just to give you an impression. Work on this will only start later, as there is no need to have this finished in a very early stage. Common theme here is keep it simple. For example, no multiple login layers.

Uploading

• There will be special upload forms on Wikimedia Commons to make uploading easier. These will be both country and language based (i.e. Netherlands-Dutch and Netherlands-English)
• There can be special upload facilities through Flickr etc, depending per country.
• Uploader will be sent to their national page first, and can go to other countries from there.
• There should be a simplified version of Commonist or a similar mass upload method.

Tools

See also for more information: Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Tools

• The database will be freely available, so that people can build tools onto it, and re-use the data. That way, you can for example project the monuments on a map, or make other additional work with it.
• There will be a central API/mapping tool
• Lets try to create a tool to help the jury go through the images and make that scale.

Coordination

National

Please make sure to involve the Wikimedia community heavily in this project. You will need all their help you can get on completing the lists and correcting the mistakes in them. Try to involve them in other aspects too, to increase their continued support. A good approach is to set up a coordination page on the wiki where the lists are located, and to give continuous feedback on completeness and quality, and to show that something is happening with the data.

International

Some steps will require international coordination and besides that there is a whole lot to learn from each other. Therefore, please communicate, communicate, communicate! There is an international mailing list you can subscribe to to stay up to date and share your experiences and problems. That is also a great way to get some help.

Lodewijk and Maarten were responsible for the Wiki Loves Monuments organization in 2010 in the Netherlands, and are willing to join in in a brainstorm session (online or in real life) to help you figure out the problems and potential solutions. That might be an effective way to get the community together in one place and exchange some real experiences.

At the end of March, we can do some brainstorming perhaps at the Chapters Meeting, but we think it is more important to have a real dedicated meeting in May, where all attending groups can participate and we can coordinate the things that need to be coordinated like European jury etc. More information to follow.

For online coordination, please all keep the progress page up to date.

Timeline

Deadlines:

• End of August: Major PR announcements
• Start contest: September 1
• End conterst: September 30
• Deadline formation European jury: September 30
• National jury deadline: October 31
• European jury deadline: November 21
• Prize announcement: begin December

A more detailed timeline is published here: Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Timeline.

We want to join!

So... you think this would be a cool event? That is great! A good way to start is to review these pages (this concept page, the timeline linked above and the post mortem of last year), to review the progress table for your country (here) and to subscribe to the mailing list and introduce yourself there. If there is a chapter in your country, definitely approach them too and see if they are interested in running this.