Grants talk:PEG/WM UA/Wiki Loves Monuments 2015/Report

Hi Antanana, NickK, Olena Zakharian, and everyone else who worked on this report and WLM Ukraine 2015. Congratulations on another very successful Wiki Loves Monuments! It's very impressive that yet again Ukraine uploaded the most number of photos. This report is approved. Please see our comments/questions below.

We understand organizing the contest got off to a challenging start having to deal with the Crimea question and this affected a number of things -- level of participation, negative media attention, arguments among community members, etc. While the WMF was not able to support you in the way you would have wanted, we do appreciate that in the end you put the decision to hold the contest to the community and were able to move forward. Unfortunately, this will probably continue to be an issue in the near future, so understanding how to engage the community in discussion and making decisions in time to not derail a project is important.
Now that you've done the contest several times, it's obvious that the team is skilled in developing lists, engaging the community, managing social media, and hosting a great awards ceremony. It's always interesting to read in your reports how you are learning from your experiences and innovating with the contest design. The addition of the post-ceremony feedback discussion is really great! Can you share any high-level feedback that the team is thinking to implement next year? Your strategy to award more points to monuments not yet photographed also seems to have been really effective.
Since publishing the pocket calendars makes up almost 1/3 of the total budget, it would be helpful to understand how they were given out and to whom. Is this something you see as being essential to the success of the project? In future contests would you want to do the same or allocate the funds to something else, like prizes?

Thank you again for a terrific report and a successful project! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Alex and thank you for your feedback!

This was a shock for us last year as we learned about WMRU's desicion to include Crimea only in August (and honestly Russian organisers were not ready to organise a contest in Crimea either, for instance, they had no monument lists for Sevastopol). As we know about this in advance this year, we will be ready to prepare a plan and discuss this issue with the community beforehand (e.g. several months before the contest)
We published the feedback on the contest website (in Ukrainian). One particularly interesting idea (from both participants and the jury) was to ask whether a particular photo is submitted only to the quantitative nomination or to both quality and quantity nominations (e.g. as a checkbox in UploadWizard). Other ideas included recommendations or coaching for newbies by experienced photographers, asking participants to document the state of each monument (for instance by correcting mistakes in descriptions), adding special awards (for series of photos, for monuments of national minorities, for abandoned monuments etc.) or making a tool to suggest monuments to picture.
As we have stated in the report, we initially planned to publish calendars and postcards, but we replaced them with calendars and a journal. Thus calendars alone do not make 1/3 of the budget, but calendars and journals together do. We do not think that calendars are essential to the success of the project although they increase motivation of participants. On the other hand, we think that journals are very important for the success of the project, particularly because they will help us reach specialists in this area. We intend to distribute these journals in four ways: to The Monuments of Ukraine subscribers (mostly historians, architects and GLAM professionals), to our winners (having your photo published in a journal is a good motivation), to our partners (as a nice outreach material) and during outreach events in different regions (to raise awareness about the contest). In future contests we plan to allocate funds both to prizes and to souvenirs and publications about the contest and outreach events.

Thank you and please do not hesitate to ask if you need further information! — NickK (talk) 20:07, 19 March 2016 (UTC)Reply