[Wiki Loves Monuments] 'evaluation'

Sat May 2 12:57:04 UTC 2015

Jane, you are quite right, and this illustrates a clear distinction 
between what at least the UK organisers considered 'valuable' and what 
the Foundation is focusing on.

One of the main aims of the UK contest was to encourage the collection, 
development, promotion and distribution of open knowledge. This was done 
by uploading photographs to Wikimedia Commons in line with Commons' open 
knowledge aims [1] of providing a media file repository:

  * that makes available public domain and freely-licensed educational
    media content to all, and
  * that acts as a common repository for the various projects of the
    Wikimedia Foundation.

The WMF evaluation addresses only the second of these open knowledge 
aims, which may be understandable from the Foundation's perspective, but 
was never our main purpose.

In most countries I suspect that the narrow focus of "improving 
Wikipedia" was not the reason for running the contest.  It has been 
known for some time that WLM is not a particularly effective way to 
achieve that specific goal.   The goal of improving Wikipedia is of 
course useful in its own right, and indeed may be something we will 
consider next time.  It will not be tackled through the WLM contest, though.

Michael (WLM-UK organiser)

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope
> Jane Darnell <mailto:jane023 at gmail.com>
> 2 May 2015 13:20
> I was a bit surprised to learn that Wikimedia Commons files are only 
> "valuable" if they are explicitly used to illustrate Wikipedia 
> articles. Though of course that is important, there are lots and lots 
> of Wikipedia articles that link out to Commons categories too. One of 
> the most admirable parts of the whole WLM concept is the ability of 
> the campaign wizard to pre-sort the image files into such categories 
> for further categorization by volunteers. That time investment would 
> be seen as having zero value, according to the article
>
>
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> Samat <mailto:samat78 at gmail.com>
> 2 May 2015 13:09
> I aggree with both of you, these are the main goals :)
>
> (Personally I prefer Lodewijk's approach, I think community building 
> and outreach is more important than simple content creation, at least 
> for us.)
>
> Samat
>
>
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> Lodewijk <mailto:lodewijk at effeietsanders.org>
> 2 May 2015 13:02
> I think this is a clear demonstration that WLM is a diverse project :) 
> You identify that having a picture for each monument is the main goal, 
> but as you know I disagree with that: for me the competition is and 
> will always be a tool to get more people on board, to get people aware 
> of the fact they can contribute, and help them over the threshold. For 
> many local competitions, it is more important however to use WLM as a 
> community building tool. I have seen great outcomes in this field in 
> the Middle East, where communities work together in real life for one 
> of their first main projects, and after that continue to organize 
> other activities as well.
>
> Best,
> Lodewijk
>
>
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> Romaine Wiki <mailto:romaine.wiki at gmail.com>
> 2 May 2015 12:54
> The focus of the evaluation is very much biased.
>
> The focus is too much on money, it gives me a horrible feeling, the 
> community/participants are not a factory plant in what every employee 
> needs to work a minimum number of hours. The goal of Wiki Loves 
> Monuments is to get all monuments with a good picture on Wikipedia, 
> not just of the most popular or easy monuments. The first time a 
> contest as such is organised the low hanging fruits are done first, 
> but they forget to mention that getting the low hanging fruits is not 
> the core goal of Wiki Loves Monuments. The goal of Wiki Loves 
> Monuments is to get a photo of every monument. The more monuments get 
> a picture, it becomes much harder to ge a picture of the other 
> monuments. It are too much easy thoughts without thinking it through. 
> It is failing in describing the actual situation and misses totally 
> what Wiki Loves Monuments is about.
>
> WMF has set some objectives for itself, and now the evaluate those 
> objectives/goals, even while Wiki Loves Monuments has a different focus.
>
> To me the evaluation is a signal that WMF is too far away from the 
> actual community.
>
> Romaine
>
>
>
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