Hello all,
I know there has been some discussion about a Wiki Loves Monuments in
the UK, but I have heard little back after that. I think there is
definitely a lot of potential in the UK for setting up a project like
this, and hope that it would be possible to find the volunteers to run
this in the coming time.
Who can take the lead on this in the UK?
Please see
for my email and offer to join a brainstorm session if there would be
need/advantage for that. If that would help, I am more than happy to
join you guys somewhere reachable in a conversation on how to make
this happen. I got the suggestion the coming up London Meetup might be
helpful. Are there many interested people from outside London? Would
Wikimedia UK be able and willing to set up a meeting there and to
reimburse for example some travel costs for those outside London to
join the meeting? Just shooting some suggestions here, I'm sure you
can come up with better :)
Do remind please that to make this work, you really have to give this
a start in February, or it will be very hard to have the lists and
systems in place in time.
I look forward to your positive and constructive replies!
Lodewijk Gelauff
2010/12/15 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>et>:
Forwarding with permission of the sender. I'm very
eager to see the UK and
Ireland participate in this if possible, but from my experience of running
Britain Loves Wikipedia I'm very aware that this needs a team of people
running it rather than just one person. So: is anyone interested in
leading/helping with this project?
Thanks,
Mike
Begin forwarded message:
From: Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
Date: 14 December 2010 20:20:15 GMT
To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)"
<internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Internal-l] Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - Europe?
Reply-To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination \(closed
subscription\)" <internal-l(a)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 can be
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.
In June 2009 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 1-30 September 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 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 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_sys…
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