This page is for discussion of Wiki Loves Monuments - 2012, what worked well and what didn't, but most importantly it is for discussion of Wiki Loves Monuments - 2013, how we can improve WLM next year.
Just a few statistics on WLM-US 2012 (updated from last month): 22,044 photos uploaded by just over 2,000 users (~90% newbies) into Commons:Category:Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 in the United States, with 30 editors uploading over 100 photos each. 5,865 of these files are now used in articles or lists (26.6% of all files in the category), on 3,232 article or list pages with 8,162 total uses (from http://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/glamorous/ a very useful tool). The "usage" would be higher if we consider the commonscat template on article pages for historic districts where commonscat is quite useful.
In all our lists 45,324 out of 87,901 (51.56%) sites have photos as of Dec 3, up from 38,896 (44.63%) photos on Aug. 31, an increase of 6,428 (not all from WLM) (from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Monuments_database/Statistics ). Very, very roughly we got in one month the number of photos usually uploaded in one year. If the example of the Netherlands is applicable here, then this rate of upload should continue at least another 2 years during the contest. We also got new uploaders from all around the country, including states where we've been weak before.
For the most part, I'll say that the photos were comparable in quality to our usual photos, and the new photos were placed in lists and articles within a few days of uploading, which the newbie uploaders definitely cared about. There was however a delay of a couple of weeks restocking WP:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Unused images right as the contest ended. Several of the new uploaders are still uploading on a regular basis and/or have moved into creating articles. There haven't been any major copyright problems, maybe a dozen mostly related to sculptures which are always difficult. Several counties have reached Fully-Illustrated status (e.g. Montgomery and Bucks County, PA near me - thanks Shuvaev!) There was a drive to create articles for the 500 pix sent to the jury and at least 54 new articles were created. There were also several interesting discussion related to WLM on the talk page, and I'll suggest that this has helped loosen up an occasionally staid, conservative project.
There were also a few negatives (what would a photo contest be without negatives? ;-p ) These were mostly attributable to me as coordinator, e.g. there were several Wiki-meetups and events arranged by WALRUS that contributed photos, but basically I had no idea how to integrate them into the contest. The worst, for me, was the California State lists which just kinda showed up on my doorstep one day like an orphan, and I allowed it to just kinda stay there. While the jury itself was great, the process leading up to the photos being sent to the final jury needs some work. We definitely over-worked Thundersnow, who showed a few days before the contest started (an absolute life-saving miracle), began placing photos and put in enough hours to get his Wiki-pension vested.
So I won't ask whether we should do this again. It's pretty obvious to me that we will continue it in some form. But what form? What should we take out, what should we add? Did we do anything that inconvenienced the members of WP:NRHP who didn't want to participate? And who wants to coordinate this next year? Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:07, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
A couple of direct questions:
This was pretty controversial in the days before starting the contest. It is crucial to the contest.
We've got some time to work on this, e.g. if we want to and need to try to change a rule to implement upload buttons. I'll just ask that nobody take a fixed position that we absolutely have to or absolutely can't, before we decide what we want to do. Modifying rules is one of the most common procedures on Wikipedia and we have the time to do it. Of course we'd have to make an effort to do it right, if we want to do it, e.g. bring in lots of folks who may disagree with us and publicize the discussion on Village Pump.
My reading of the problem is that less than a dozen editors several years ago came to a fairly confused consensus (liberally defined) to disallow "placeholders" for people's portraits in articles. Admins then began enforcing this rule in a straightforward way to anything that looks like a placeholder - perhaps they have a newer consensus among themselves on what the rule actually means. In any case the rule needs to be clarified, and if we need to we can likely modify it in the usual Wikipedia way.
May I suggest a starting point that everybody should be able to work with. Let's assume that the rule is not completely clear, but that we should not ignore it in the next WLM. After deciding what we really want to do with the upload button (year round vs. one month, etc.), then we can make a narrowly focused request for clarification, or (as individuals, not as a project) attempt to change the rule in the least disruptive way possible. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:23, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
If it merely, and prominently, asks readers to find their way through the usual routine of Commons, finding a category and the other complications we hard-core Wikiphotographers happily endure every day, then no. Rather it should discretely, for example in a line or two near the bottom of any unillustrated article about a person or place or the infobox, ask for a photo. More important, clicking ought to bring up a simplified Commons uploading form with filename, a few provisional categories and a partial description already robotically stocked with information from the article. That can be a boon to illustration and an attraction to newbies, without being a corporate embarrassment. Jim.henderson (talk) 04:04, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Oh! It is done! And it works! Yesterday at this time (about 13:30 EST) on my way up Fulton Street to a German artist's walking tour, I saw a building labelled "Brooklyn Tabernacle". Hmm, has Wikipedia an article, prefererably an unillustrated one? "Yes!" my Android phone told me, and it has a button to tap, labelled with something like "Upload the first picture for this article". So, I tapped it, stepped back a little, snapped a poor picture, and tapped the upload button. I saw the picture in the article, put the phone away and joined a dozen history fans for a tour of Eminent Domain sites in Brooklyn Heights, Vinegar Hill, Fort Green and so forth. Alas, upon getting home I failed to find any sign of my upload. Apparently I did something wrong; probably failed to tap a confirmation button. Haste and surprise together make wasted effort. However, sitting calmly in my easy chair today I succeeded in uploading from the Android Gallery. This is very pleasant. Now I have to figure how to make the camera phone take better pictures. Won't return to Brooklyn however until Tuesday, probably after Sunset, but will stop at the front side of the building on Smith Street and hope for a better picture. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:38, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
Today on my Android phone I'm seeing an "add the first photo" button at the top of each unillustrated article for any particular NRHP. Whatever causes it, it doesn't show on my home Windows screen or in the article's markup. Mysterious, but highly useful. In the NYC area, which is the only place I ever go, NRHP list articles have a link to the individual article of each item, if there is one. In a few cases the same building has different names, so I must use my local familiarity to find and link them. The article, even if it wasn't previously watched, appears on my watchlist. The upload also appears in my Commons watchlist. Main shortcomings are, there's no description section and the Commons categorization bot runs later and is very dumb. All of which I can easily live with. Lack of my favorite license choice is very little bother; in the field I wouldn't want to take time to tap out of the default anyway. Simplicity is the supreme merit when my fingers are getting cold. Jim.henderson (talk) 04:04, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
True, upload buttons are plentiful and diverse and have diverse problems. Some are available only by mobile, which as a mobile photographer is where I want them. The WLM phone app, whose database of desired pictures hasn't been updated for months, has upload buttons. The Beta version of the mobile web version has an upload button at the top of every unillustrated article, even disambiguators as I learned last night by looking up BRT which clearly it should not.
After WLM ended, such buttons in list articles as shown on the old "desktop version" of Wikipedia disappeared. This version is what the majority of readers and almost all editors still use, and to me the button question is less important in this version because I cannot use it in the field and the old methods serve me well enough at the desk. However, many editors, especially our much-desired newbies, would be better served by upload buttons, both on individual articles and on list ones. Not terribly prominent buttons, however. For list items for which we have no picture, a button in the picture column might work quite well, but many existing pictures are poor and beg replacement. I think a separate column is too much for this purpose, and like the idea of an icon in the description column. Like, a simple camera symbol to click on, with of course a hover box to explain its purpose. I wonder if there's a more general, more centralized discussion somewhere about upload buttons. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:17, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
The international organizers love September, but they have made a couple of minor exceptions, e.g. for Israel's holiday. They'll try to disuade us, but would anybody else prefer to do this in July?
July would be a great time because:
September is not so good because, with the start of the school year, many folks are busy with other things. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:38, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
I understand about wanting to include pictures in the contest from year-round, but don't think it would fly with the international group. It would pretty much transform a one-month contest into a year-round contest. I also don't like giving people an incentive to hold pix until September, but the idea of letting newbies (and thus everybody else) upload old pix makes a lot of sense. BTW, have you seen the guy uploading the pix from the 1970s? Maybe we could have two separate contests - our own October-August - nominate your 3 best pix for the 11 months, and the other contest in September with the international rules.
As I read the opinions above, nobody wants to move to a one-month July contest if it means being out of step with the international contest. Is anybody in favor of trying to move the international contest to July? Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:38, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
It takes a lot of time to look at 22,000 photos (think 15 seconds per photo). Israel came up with a reasonable judging tool near the end of the contest, and it has now been tested for smaller groups of photos, for a small group of judges. The tradeoff is between inviting in the general public for a single-knockout round, or loading a ton of work on a few judges. Having multiple public voting on 22,000 photos, to my knowledge doesn't work - or at least nobody came up with a program that would do it. I'll suggest getting at least 10 people to commit to at least 10 hours of voting each - can that be accomplished?
I'm not at all comfortable saying "We gotta have x people volunteer or else ..." For one thing I don't think it would work with this project. But I do think it is important for everybody to know that if we want certain features in the program, e.g. a photo contest where every photo is actually looked at, then there are certain labor requirements, e.g. 100+ hours. If people want to suggest certain features in WLM, I'll ask that they also consider how much work is required and who is going to do it. Are they volunteering?
The self-nomination system was certainly botched this year - coming as a last minute compromise between those who insisted that every photo be considered without any self-screening and me insisting that some self-screening was necessary. Compromising those contradictory positions just made a mess and more work. I still think that self-nomination is the way to go. If every uploader just nominated 1 photo, we'd only have 2,000 photos and the work component would not be worth mentioning. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:03, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm glad so many people think it worked well, but I was thinking that just below the surface... And if we had had 30,000 photos it could have been a major disaster. I can certainly contribute a lot of time to this, but not nearly as much as I did this year. Maybe somebody who is more technically proficient with voting systems would like to take over this aspect of the contest? Self-nomination is one possible way to go. Getting input from the general public might be another way - though is technically difficult. Limiting nomination to just sites not previously photographed on the lists might be another. Technical fixes can only go so far - i.e. I don't think a 1 second evaluation time per photo is reasonable even if the software supported it. In any case, I can't make last year's system work next year without a whole lot of help. Smallbones(smalltalk) 05:20, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
As far as I saw, everybody in the project was helpful to newbies when asked, but there was no organization or time to go out and actively help. This is the most important step to me. If we can get 1% of the newbies (that's 20) to keep contributing after the contest, we'll get close to being fully illustrated in a couple of years!
Is there a way to get another 10 people to contribute another 10 hours of time?
Please feel free to answer any or all of these questions and add in more questions. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:02, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Should the state lists be allowed next year (then they need to be prepared), or may be just for some states, or only NRHP?--Ymblanter (talk) 21:48, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
During WLM2012, Smallbones led an effort to create individual articles for NRHPs not yet having them, where pics were uploaded. There occasionally have been cases, in WLM2012 or otherwise, where pics of wrong objects were uploaded to NRHP list-articles, e.g. of a modern bank building or fire station that replaced the historic NRHP-listed one. Having articles existing with NRHP nom docs linked, allows for checking of pics by reviewers, or, better, allows persons to be informed before taking a pic or uploading it. And, where an article is created, multiple new photos can all be put right in, or set up into commons categories that are linked. For Historic districts, especially, it seems a shame that many uploaded pics were not accomodated in the 'pedia, rather just one pic was selected to represent the HD at the list-article. Should we push to add NRHP nom docs where now available, and/or to create articles in advance, say for all HDs? --doncram 06:08, 11 December 2012 (UTC)