Grants talk:PEG/WM ZA/WLM-ZA-2014/Report

Thank you for this detailed grant report and congratulations on a successful WLM! We appreciate your focus this year on image quality and increasing the number of participants. While it is very challenging to systematically assess quality (and we realize you did try to do this!), it's great to hear that the judges felt that overall quality has improved since last year. Looking forward, planning photography workshops in partnership with ORMS is a great way to support even higher quality images. We would also like to see activities next year that aim to support participants' transition from just taking photos to actually integrating them on Wikimedia projects. This will not only put the photos to use and improve content, but will also create new editors who may continue to edit after the competition is over. Do you have more specific details around improved coverage of monuments? For example, how many new monuments were added this year? It's really a shame that the Copyright Law of 1978 is such a barrier and we hope that your efforts with Creative Commons South Africa will improve the situation. Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 11 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Alex, great question. One of the activies we are planning to do to both increase the range of participants whilst further increase quality and getting more focused coverage is to organise a number of photographic workshops with our partners at ORMS focused on teaching people how to take pictures of buildings/monuments. ORMS can fill them up with people whilst getting a professional photographer to teach them and we can give them a list of monuments to cover whilst teaching them about contributing to Commons and telling them about Wiki Loves Monuments. With the workshops we feel we will be able to:

Increase the quality of submitted photographs
Increase coverage of still uncovered monuments within the Cape Town City Centre (about 400 of the 3019 listed heritage sites in South Africa are located there)
Increase the range of participants within the photographic community participating in the competition
Increase awareness of Wiki Loves Monuments, Creative Commons, and contributing to Wikipedia.

As for increasing the usage of submitted photographs on Wikipedia what we have been doing so far is, as the pictures are reviewed, I have been adding a number of the better ones to certain Wikipedia articles. However this is not enough. I think next year I would like to incentivise participants to actually use their pictures on Wikipedia. From what I can tell the majority of participants to WLM do not contribute to Wikipedia as well as Commons (through WLM) and prompting them to do so would be, I feel, a positive move. One way of doing this would be to build it into the workshops mentioned above. I suspect however that that would only have a small impact. Therefore I would propose that a new prize category be created on a national level for "Best used picture on Wikipedia". On a Western Cape region level we can use funding from Heritage Western Cape to fund this new prize category but not on a national level. I did think of connecting a Wiki contribution to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd prizes overall but I am very concerned that by doing that we would be once again scaring off new participants and people who do not feel confident enough to edit Wikipedia. We have invested quite a bit in broadening the rang of participants outside of the usual Wiki-community and I would like to continue that whilst using WLM as a gateway to encouraging new editors/contributors. --Discott (talk) 07:39, 12 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Discott . The workshops are a great idea and I do think that adding on an element of how to add your photo to an article would be useful as well as a special prize in that category! Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:53, 12 December 2014 (UTC)Reply