Grants talk:PEG/ARCHÉ/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania/Report

Hi Strainu. Thanks for submitting your grant report and congrats on a very successful Wiki Loves Monuments competition! It's great that you reached all your goals and the quality of photos is impressive. We have a few follow-up questions on the report:

Do you have a sense of the number of new monuments that were covered this year?
Using the Glamorous tool, I found that in the category "Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania", there are 8,282 files, the photos have been used 1,339 times and 1,188 distinct images have been used on Wikimedia projects (14% of all images in the category). These numbers are just slightly different than the ones you found.
In terms of number of articles created/improved, 369 articles is a lot! Since you didn't have a dedicated writing campaign associated with the photo competition, I'm wondering how you were able to reach this number? Did you do specific outreach around editing articles?
The wiki weekend was the most expensive item in your budget. I'm wondering if you thought it was a good investment. 200 photos were taken that weekend, which is not that actually that many compared to the total. But, I'd be interested to hear if you think it had other benefits like community building or more deeply engaging new editors. Do you think it's something you would want to do again in the future?

Looking forward to your responses. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:58, 13 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

From the total of 1398 monuments mentioned in the report that received pictures in this edition, a number of 853 didn't have any before September 2014, they are newly covered (see the stats page).
As in every year, some of the images on Commons were deleted due to missing FoP in Romania. In order to reduce the number of deleted images, in 2014 we redirected users to ro.wp for monuments built in the 20th century, obtaining a few more (currently 416) and bringing the current total to 8698. The 3 missing images and 9 missing usages (1197-1188) are probably due to deletions on Commons between January and March and to changing the pictures from this year to some other (perhaps older) pictures. As the time goes by, more pictures will move between ro.wp and Commons or get deleted.
We have a dedicated section about historic monuments at each writing contest, but this yields only about a dozen articles every 6 months or so. This year we had a couple of new Wikimedians who took on to writing articles about statues in Bucharest and buildings in Moldova, which probably near 100 articles by now. The rest were mostly bot-generated articles, based on the data from the lists and text from Europeana and the the Ministry of Culture.
The Wiki Weekend was indeed very expensive, at about $5/photo (we have 88 more pictures at ro.wp, for about 300 in total). But it was important for reaching our main goal (the best coverage of any website), as it brought Călărași County from the second-to-last place in coverage towards the middle of the rankings, by increasing coverage from 5% to 26%. It has also allowed some of the uploaders from previous years to get to know each other and the team, and it taught us a great deal on how to get more from these weekends:

The first thing we noticed was that only about 10 people uploaded images, mostly previous uploaders. Newbies only uploaded 1-2 images, or even none. After discussing this internally, we realized that the uploading process is still scary and that a short demo on Saturday night might help.
There were too many people covering the same monuments and a lot of time was lost due to lacking coordinates. 2 minibuses working on different parts of the county might yield better results, but would increase costs and organizing effort. An alternative would be to have 1-2 people go ahead and "discover" the monuments before the bus comes.
Established Wikimedians are hard to convince to go offline, mostly due to geographic spreading. More flexibility in the places where one can join the tour might help here.

All in all, we feel it would be important to try again and see if we can get more from these real-life meetings. There is only so much that can be achieved from occasional uploads and electronic communication and ro.wp needs the extra push.--Strainu (talk) 08:32, 14 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi Strainu. Thanks for these thoughtful comments. In terms of the Wiki Weekend, having a training component on both photographing historical buildings and uploading, has proved useful in other countries. There is definitely a benefit to having in-person activities and it will be good to integrate the lessons learned from this year in future events. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply