On 18 January 2012 03:38, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would argue that the UK is a uniquely bad place for
wikipedia loves
monuments.
There was plenty of discussion of WLM in the UK flying around yesterday,
between and after the GLAM events in London. Let me try to give a summary,
reserving the right to post my own opinions later. We do have the upcoming
workshop, and perhaps discussion on this list can be a stepping stone
towards having that workshop addressing issues in depth and more
effectively.
The workshop is at the London office of WMUK on Saturday 18 February from 1
pm:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_brainstorm
(A) Aims and objectives:
What running WLM in the UK would do that matters most is that it could make
two contributions to the overall effort:
(a) provide useful images usefully categorized on Commons;
(b) increase participation in the projects, by bringing in new people.
I heard the opinion that (b) matters more than (a).
(B) Running the thing:
Given that we know why running WLM would be of benefit, there is a
Procrustean bed argument that it has to be run in a certain way. This may
come in three parts:
(i) WLM is a global “brand”: it has been run before, and any UK version
would have to live up to and comply with certain pre-existing ideas and
norms.
(ii) Annotated lists: the model is that there are lists of places
(“monuments”, a concept that has various definitions) that are annotated in
certain ways, at the heart of the photo scavenger hunt. There is discussion
about what these lists should be, how to get hold of them, and what to do
with them once the required information is obtained.
(iii) WLM is run as a competition, so there have to be rules, a judging
process, and prizes set up in a way compatible with what is trying to be
achieved here.
So: (i) can be bypassed if there is a better model of what would be good to
do in the UK, which just ought to be called something distinctive. I.e.
there is an argument that the localization of WLM to UK conditions is too
tricky, and we should start with a clean sheet of paper. A counter-argument
is that WLM has not yet been run here, so that there is a danger of
reinventing the wheel.
Part (ii) is where a fair amount of effort has been placed so far. Here the
localization business hits the major issue that different countries hold
this kind of “heritage” information in different ways, administratively
speaking. Cue quite a long discussion of what is actually done here,
depending on what definition of “monument” is taken.
Part (iii) comes down to a couple of issues, it seems. Firstly, scale
(success makes more work for the judges); secondly, setting up a system
with the right sort of incentives; which then comes down to nuances in A
(a) under aims.
(C) View from Commons:
Debates on WLM seem good at throwing up secondary discussions about the
issue of UK-related images on Commons. Briefly put: the import of UK images
from the Geograph site to Commons has been a huge accession, representing a
substantial proportion of the site; the accessioning work is demanding
technically with unresolved issues; and the portion of that which is
straight categorization work is still largely there to be completed.
Now all this doesn’t actually undermine the aims of running WLM, but it
complicates the issue in more than one fashion. The points I understand are
these:
1. Technically the position could be improved by the use of bots and tools,
but these are not all to hand yet.
2. Running WLM-UK is going to add to the accessioning problem, however you
cut it.
3. In a pragmatic sense having more eyeballs on the categorization issue on
Commons for UK images is, in accordance with general wiki reasoning, going
to help. In other words there may be snags and issues that come up as a
result of trying to run WLM-UK, that cannot be minimized or dealt with in
the next six months. But that doesn’t mean that ducking those issues is the
right decision. It means the decision should be informed by the “view from
Commons”.
4. Going back to what would be meant by “useful” in aim A (a), setting up
the competitive side in B (iii) above ought to take all this into account.
Tweak the system so that competitors get more credit for images considered
more useful (e.g. filling a gap rather than duplicating something), and
consider a range of prizes, reflecting the way that categorization activity
fundamentally improves the usefulness of files on Commons.
(D) The Board and finding a way to run a competition
Here lies one of the things the workshop should be addressing. There is the
chicken-and-egg issue of whether the Board can get a volunteer to head up
WLM-UK before all the issues above are sensibly resolved; or whether the
Board should be prepared to delegate some of the decision-making about how
to run it to someone who would then be empowered to get it run in line with
a short specification of aims. I think this is roughly where we are.
Charles