Wikimedia Conference 2017/Program/24

24: New ambitions for Wiki Loves Monuments: Collaborating to discover, document, and share the world's built heritage

How to move forward

Lila presenting

What was this session about?

It was a session about the longstanding photo contest “Wiki Loves Monument” and about the organizers’ plans and steps to be taken for the upcoming edition in September.

What are the next steps to be taken?

More communities / affiliates will be integrated into the contest, information will be shared on a one-to-one basis.

Photos

see the Commons category

Slides

Audience: Those interested to learn more about Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 or organize the contest or data enrichment activities around it in their country.
Session Format: Presentation followed by a Q&A
Length: 60 min
Room setting: U-shape
Description

Every year, thousands of people around the world come together to discover, document, and share our built cultural heritage through Wiki Loves Monuments, the world's largest photo competition. The competition has been held for the past seven years, thanks to the dedication of hundreds of volunteers and staff members of various affiliations, groups of Wikimedians and beyond.

In this session, we present what we have achieved together so far and share with you the plan for 2017. This includes sharing with you information about the timeline of the campaign, how to get involved for the first time, and how to get your Wiki Loves Monuments campaign to the next level. We will also present some of the projects the international team have picked up or is heavily involved with in 2017, to help you familiarize yourself with these projects and potentially get more involved with them in your country. Below you can find more information about these projects.

We will work closely with Wikimedia Sverige on the migration of Monuments Database to Wikidata. We will share with you our vision for a future where monuments data is stored in Wikidata, give you an update about this effort, and will look for volunteer countries to start surfacing their monuments data directly from Wikidata in 2017.
We are going to build the first version of a dashboard that will help Wiki Loves Monuments organizers to improve their workflow by allowing them to monitor the submissions to their campaigns for specific signals and act proactively if their intervention is needed.
We are developing Monumental, a tool developed to help the discovery and enrichment of monuments and their corresponding data. We will present the first version of the tool and discuss what the tool can offer once completed.
We are going to organize a Data Enrichment campaign ahead of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017. The goal of this campaign is to enrich the monuments data in Monuments Database or Wikidata. We will share with you information about the infrastructure we will offer for such campaigns and will be looking for volunteer countries to organize such campaigns prior to September 2017.

Join this session to learn about Wiki Loves Monuments and how you can become a local organizer.

Desired Outcome

Learn about Wiki Loves Monuments -- how to get involved, why it's valuable, and how the world's biggest photo competition can get even better.
Sign up to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in your country in 2017
Learn about new ways to participate in Wiki Loves Monuments beyond the photo competition, including enriching Wikidata.
Share your challenges or ask questions, if you are unsure if you’re ready to participate.

Next Steps and Milestones

Following the event, we will share information with local organizers as they prepare for Wiki Loves Monuments in September 2017.

Speakers: LilyOfTheWest, Lodewijk Gelauff, Romaine

Documentation

Lila (Lilyofthewest) introduced shortly herself, before starting with the presentation. The main message is that Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a highly successful initiative, with a lot information about monuments collected, around 45,000 volunteers onboarded and communities built despites some challenges. However, WLM is not done yet, as they are still missing monuments from 100 countries.

Lila presented different improvements and developments, basically there are 5 projects for 2017:

0) Project '0' is keep doing what they are already doing, and doing it better: maintaining and improving the existing infrastructure. Onboarding, basic infrastructure, working on complicated cases, international jury process etc.
1) Migration to Wikidata. WMSE focused on this, but with the international team in support. Enriching existing articles with images/geocoordinates. Working to combine all the information held between Commons Images, Wikipedia lists and Wikidata lists. So migrating everything slowly to Wikidata is going to really help with keeping lists up to date and the data in good order. At least one country will try to run WLM entirely off Wikidata in 2017.
2) Enrich monuments data. Adds another area of contribution for volunteers. A challenge *before* WLM. The aim is to encourage communities to focus on enriching that data in their own country as another type of challenge.
3) Monumental: Grant by WMSE, to solve problem of WLM data not being discoverable or explorable.
4) Challenges of Monitoring Campaign. It is quite difficult at the moment to monitor campaign, both for organisers and participants. Aims to create overview of it all. Updates on issues such as nominations for deletion, what stage of a jury process an image is in.

In the end, Lila asked all participants to notify the international team soon, if they want to be involved in 2017!

Q & A + Comments from the session

Q: How many prizes at the national level?
Lila: As complicated as you want, top 10 is standard, but if you have the resources you could award prizes to more people.

Q: Will there be an enabling of other Intl projects after the competition using the WLM developed uploaders or infrastructure or databases?
Lila: There’s an open question about whether volunteers contacted will participate in other projects.

Q: What were the strongest opinions about making the competition annual/bi-annual
Lila: Annual stuck with people better.
Lodewijk: For the Netherlands the decision was to do it biannually, to not clash with Wiki Loves Earth. But the rhythm needs to work locally.
Alex Stinson: A fuller international calendar is really good for repeat engagement.

Q: More effort and money goes into it for less results in Czech Republic. Could we have an initiative to create articles to match all the monuments?
Lila: Related to Data Enrichment, and also WMNL’s writing contest.
Vira Morotko: WMUA also did a writing contest together.
Lila: Again, integration is something that we’ve tried and seems to work.
Shannon Eichelberger: tried it in Ireland, not great results, but worth the experience.

Q: Unofficial monuments? Are these to be incorporated?
Lila: Going forward, possible change of policy. E.g UNESCO official is not the same official as others. There’s a lot of attention to some, but not all monuments.
John Andersson: The UNESCO challenge is underway and starts in 3 weeks btw…

Q: How do we address the issues of underrepresented monuments?
Lila: working on what strategies can we use to make sure that attention covers a broader range of monuments.
Comment: Possible points system to address the problem of monuments that are not focused on so much.

Q: Does this mean that newcomers need to understand Wikidata?
Lila: Essentially it’s just the back-end. So newcomers would never see or interact with Wikidata directly. WMSE are supporting in the process of dealing with this so, for example, Wikimedia Iran don’t have to.
John Andersson: Lot of work, so working with subsections that are essential for the contest, but we can’t move all the data unless we have the right licensing for the databases.
Comment: Moving to Wikidata helps compile the lists because you can more easily import existing databases.
Comment: Monumental has a great mobile editing feature.

Q: Plans to address more mobile device use?
Lila: Main Commons concern is the addition of poor photos/selfies. This could be automated to be reduced/filtered out. Or, a separate mobile queue but this would be labour intensive?

Q: Will you provide landing page template for all competitions?
Lila: Default templates could be produced, but probably not for 2017. But it’s of interest.