Grants talk:PEG/WM ZA/Wiki From Above 2015/WFA 2015 Report

Hi Douglas and Theresa. Thank you for this detailed report. As the first drone photo competition funded by PEG and first organized by WMZA, there are a lot of useful learnings identified in the report. While the number of submissions and participants were lower than expected, it's great that the photos submitted were of such high quality and they've had a relatively high use rate on Wikipedia articles (34%)! We're particularly impressed with the multiple "most valued" images and "media of the day" recognitions. Personally, I really enjoyed the Cecil Rhodes Memorial video. It gives the viewer a really good impression of the memorial, the scale, the surrounding area, and what it's like to be there. We have a few follow-up questions and look forward to your responses.

What do you think the main reason was for the lower number of submissions than expected? Was it because this was the first year of the competition and you did not have a baseline from which to create the metric?
It sounds like the contest rules did not specify that the submissions should be from Africa or South Africa -- a good learning for next time to be specific : )
It's interesting that highest prize was for best use on Wikipedia and not best submission. Hopefully this helped to support the higher usage rate!
Do you think the 9 new users will continue to contribute? Do you have a sense of what would motivate them to contribute to Commons? It's true that none have contributed since the contest. What communication have you had with them since the competition?
Please endorse the Learning Pattern you find relevant -- A playful logo builds identity and invites interaction.

Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 11 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Apologies for the delayed response to your questions and follow-up. Thank you for the words of encouragement and I am happy it was so well received. In answer to your questions:

The main reason we think we had so few applicants is because of the small size of the community of drone pilots which whilst large (around 500-1000 in South Africa) is a much smaller community of participants than for other competitions such as photographers for WLM. The second reason would be the difficulty of uploading media/video footage to Commons. Many people commented on this in addition to the low quality (real or imagined) of footage uploaded under CC codexs like .ogg or .ogv. The third were uncertainties around copyright, many participants were uncertain about uploading their footage under a CC-BY-SA licence or what that even means. There is still a bit of a culture of copyright hugging that needs to be overcome and suspicion of unknown copyright licences.
It was a good learning experience, if a bit traumatic to confront at the time. Lesson learned. In 2016 I hope to avoid this by making it clear that the competition is an international event.
That was the idea yes. We noticed from WLM competitions that people are much happier submitting content to commons and forgetting about them there than also taking the time to learn how to use their content on Wikipedia. This prize was intended to help overcome this.
In my observation the rate of continued contributions has been about the same as for WLM which is to say not high. However the number of participants is much smaller so a larger sample size is needed. Also building up a culture of content donation to the commons will take time and a number of competitions and awareness building to develop within any culture. With the drone community it is likely a bit easier to do this if only because drone pilots tend to be more technical people so are more open to editing Wikipedia and contributing to commons if only because they are less concerned about technical barriers to do so.
Great suggestion, I have been meaning to do this for some time now. Thanks for the reminder.

Cheers, Discott (talk) 16:47, 24 May 2016 (UTC)Reply