[WikiLovesMonuments] Fwd: [Internal-l] Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - Europe?

Wed Dec 29 20:30:58 UTC 2010

Forwarding the initial mail Lodewijk and I send out.

-------- Originele bericht --------
Onderwerp: 	[Internal-l] Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - Europe?
Datum: 	Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:20:15 +0100
Van: 	Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org>
Antwoord-naar: 	Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed 
subscription) <internal-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Aan: 	Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed 
subscription) <internal-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

*Summary of this email *(sorry for long text): We did Wiki Loves 
Monuments (WLM) 2010 in the Netherlands, we would like to do Wiki Loves 
Monuments again in 2011, but now in Europe. This is only possible when 
many chapters participate, therefore this e-mail. To be clear: this 
event will only happen on a European level if there is sufficient 
chapter participation to combine efforts. *Please feel free to forward* 
to whomever you find appropriate.

You might have heard before about Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 in the 
Netherlands. It was a highly successful photo scavenger hunt with 12.500 
submissions and over 250 participants[0]. We recently completed a post 
mortem of this event with a more extensive description and analysis [1]. 
However, there are still many monuments in the Netherlands which canbe 
photographed, so we are considering another run for next year - but then 
in a European context. Below we will explain a bit how we got where we 
are, what we have in mind, and what you could expect.

So how did this all start? At the Dutch Wikipedia we have the windmill 
project. One of the main goals was to get an article with an image for 
every windmill in the Netherlands. Lists were created of windmills per 
province and statistics were made on a regular basis to track progress. 
This approach worked very well and made it possible to tackle a big 
problem; All the windmills have an article now.

Some volunteers, in cooperation with the chapter,managed to get a 
dataset of all "Rijksmonumenten" (Dutch national monuments- 60.000 
buildings/objects with some historical or cultural relevance) from the 
"Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed" (Dutch national heritage 
organisation, RCE). This marked the birth of the "Rijksmonumenten" 
project. The project uses the lessons learned in the windmill project. 
The data from the RCE was converted into lists by location and put on 
the Dutch Wikipedia. The community started improving the lists by adding 
missing information or adding photo's.

InJune2009 Wikimedia Nederland ran Wiki Loves Art /NL [2] : A photo 
scavenger hunt in more than 40 museums. Also quite successful(5.400 
photos), but much more work intensive because you need to keep contacts 
with all the museums and usually museums are further away from people's 
homes than the nearest monuments.

For 2010 we were looking for a nice topic for a photo competition. The 
"Rijksmonumenten" project was running very well so we decided to 
organize Wiki Loves Monuments to give this Wikipedia project a boost.

So, what would a European WLM most likely look like? Let me give you an 
idea of what we are thinking of, changes are open for debate of course. 
Trying to incorporate the main lessons from last year in the Netherlands 
into a European model, we think it might work best if Wiki Loves 
Monuments is organized on a national level primarily, but with 
cooperations, shared resources and international prizes on a European 
level. The national contests do not have to be identical, but some 
consistency would be practical. We are not sure yet what countries would 
be most successful, but our initial hope would be EU chapter countries 
and Switzerland.

Basically, Wiki Loves Monuments would run 1-30September 2011, and 
participants would be allowed to submit photos of monuments which are 
part of the object list. This object list includes the address and 
ideally geo-coordinates of all monuments which are allowed to 
participate. In each participating country there would be some prizes 
available, to be awarded by a jury for that country. The top-X of each 
could be competing for European prizes.

You can find more information on how WLM 2010 was organized on the 
post-mortem [1]. That also lines out in more detail how much work it 
would be, and what the positive impact could be.

Most of the local work would be to get a database with the objects, 
create object lists from that (possibly Dutch volunteers could support 
you with that, they have the experience [3]) and get the community 
involved on that. You would need to get communications going, both 
external to the press (press releases etc) as to participants (have a 
clear website in your language(s) with explanation, rules etc), find a 
jury and prizes for them to award. We can help each other with example 
press releases, best practices, template and list examples and community 
motivation.

So, what to do when you like this idea? Well, it would be good to first 
of all check with your collegues (at the board, other members, 
community) what they think of it. You probably need several people to 
run such a competition over time to some extent. Next step would be to 
do some analysis on your local situation: who would be good partners 
(who keeps the lists of monuments?) for you, how many monuments are 
there in your country, are they well spread? What information/photos are 
already available of it roughly? Are there community members involved in 
that kind of topic? Definitely read the post-mortem and some relevant 
links from there [1].

For the time being, we registered www.wikilovesmonuments.eu 
<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu> and are in touch with CARARE and 
Europeana (European cultural heritage organizations) - who seem to be 
interested in laying contacts with local cultural heritage 
organizations. Hopefully that helps them to realize the European context 
and impact this could have. The most important partner in each country 
would be the one that governs the database with all monuments, and could 
release that to you. This database/list is crucial for the success of 
such an event.

Please inform us (ideally through internal-l) when you would be 
interested in joining in such European event, if there is enough 
enthusiasm, we will create a special (easy to join) mailing list to 
coordinate efforts to allow more volunteers to join in the discussions. 
We already took the liberty of discussing this with some other chapters, 
and are hopeful that it will actually get to a first grand chapter 
cooperation program. Of course this does not mean you are bound, but 
that you think you would like to participate. You can also join 
#wikilovesmonuments 
<http://piratepad.net/ep/search?query=wikilovesmonuments>on freenode irc 
of course if you like.

With kind regards,

Maarten Dammers
Lodewijk Gelauff

[0]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments
[1]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/post_mortem
[2]:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Art_Netherlands
[3]:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/template_system

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/wikilovesmonuments/attachments/20101229/fb075562/attachment.html>