[Wiki Loves Monuments] Why deadlines exist

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2012/10/5 Peter Ekman <pdekman at gmail.com>:

> Probably more important is the case where somebody starts uploading
> hundreds of photos just before the deadline (Did this actually happen
> somewhere?) To me that suggests something wrong, but not with the bot
> or even the rules of the contest. I'm not sure I would know how to fix
> that behavior.

We had such a user. He claimed that he had prepared 40 pictures using
upload wizzard and then upoladed just a couple of them before midnight
CEST and the rest was upoladed a bit too late. He claimed that he did
that from UK (although for Polish contest) and had UTC time set in his
preferences, so was sure that his upload will be accepted. However our
regulation clearly stated that the end of contest is at midnight CEST.
Dura lex, sed lex - but I would like to avoid such situations. This
guy was really angry - his pictures were really good - so in fact -
Wikimedia Commons lost a good photographer. He stayed anonymous - if
we know his personal data at least we could send him some gadgets or
small gift to please him :-) As the one of the main goals of the
contest is to encourage people to stay with us after the contest -
such a situations are counter effective.  I see two solutions for next
year:

To enable a kind of warning banner saying for example "please hurry up
there is 15 min. left and 3 MB file takes several minutes to upload on
slower connections..." + have some special "excuse" prize for unlucky
uploaders who are late for several minutes...


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz