On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 2:19 PM Florence Devouard <fdevouard@gmail.com> wrote:


Le 29/04/2019 à 22:52, Nkansah Rexford a écrit :
Hello Isaac,

> In this year edition alone, about USD 25,000 was spent on the contest but only 8,983 photos were contributed. Many of them are either copyright violations or unusable. I don't think this is an effective way of spending donors fund and regrettably, the attitude of the organizers does not show they understand the problem.

That's interesting. Was it a year or 2 ago that ~35k$ was requested? Anyways, I remember there was a discussion to reduce the cost somewhere, suggested by the WMF grants team.

The grants were then split into 3 or 4 parts, to be funded individually. Didn't follow up with what they all amounted to.

25k$ is, frankly speaking, still high for an event like WLA. Wiki Loves Monuments caps under 10k$, the last I checked.


Hi Rex


I would strongly advise not to do any type of comparison between WLA and WLM to be honest. There are two reasons

1) for WLA, the rapid grant funding some country teams got was more or less the only funding they get an entire year. So I do hope they took the opportunity to use this funding to buy stuff that can be also useful around the year.

2) claiming that WLM cost only 10k dollars is frankly... completely aside the reality. Most developped european chapters participate to it. Their funding they dedicate to WLM is counted in their FDC budget, so you would not see it. They also dedicate staff to run WLM in the country. And not just a handful of hours.


Example: this is the portal page of WLM in France. Look at pages history.
95% of time on all those organizational pages, you will find Sarah Krichen WMF

This is part of her staff time. That is her job... and in France, a staff at Wikimedia France cost over 50k per year to the mouvement. I am fairly sure that WLM cost more than 10k euros to the mouvement just in France, and that's only one country amongst many others. 


This comparison is irrelevant.


Yeah, just to confirm: WLM has a number of associated costs. Even running the international team takes more than that - I'm not sure where the number $10k comes from. However, WLM and WLAf are different in many many ways, I wouldn't want to compare them in general. 

And in general, using dollar returns on investment is a relatively unhelpful exercise: most of the returns are intangible (the images are only one component of the outcomes), and most of the investments are intangible (hours and hours of volunteer effort). 

Best,
Lodewijk (member of the WLM international team)



> This does not in anyway stop any country from organizing a nationwide photography contest on contents that are not adequately available for use on Wikimedia projects.

Yep, but the big question is, will the WMF fund such nationwide photography contest? Heck, will the WMF fund individual grants of professionals who wanna help in such regards? Frankly speaking, will the WMF fund?


Until WMF has finalized its 2030 strategy... nothing is certain :)


Florence



cheers,
rexford

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 7:42 PM Isaac Olatunde <reachout2isaac@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Ingo,

It seems you were completely ignored by the organizers in December 2018. Sadly, this is not a good approach to solving problems.

Let's be honest, the amount of donor's fund and community resources deployed for this contest does not equate to the value it's actually adding to bringing knowledge gap in Africa. 

In this year edition alone, about USD 25,000 was spent on the contest but only 8,983 photos were contributed. Many of them are either copyright violations or unusable. I don't think this is an effective way of spending donors fund and regrettably, the attitude of the organizers does not show they understand the problem.

I honestly do not see any reason to continue to deploy donors fund on Wiki Loves Africa, with no tangle results. This does not in anyway stop any country from organizing a nationwide photography contest on contents that are not adequately available for use on Wikimedia projects.

Regards,

Isaac



On Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 6:10 PM Ingo Koll <ikoll@gmx.de wrote:

Dear fellow Wikimedians, dear Florence,

as the Wiki loves Africa 2019 competition is coming to its close I would like to bring back the question which I raised already in December 2018:

1. Do others share my impression that images from the competition are hardly ever used in wikipedia articles?

2. Do others have the impression that the present approach for Wiki Loves Africa does not help much to close the knowledge gap about Africa?

When I posted in December some participants here voiced interest but wanted to wait for a feedback fom the organizers. Such a feedback I have not seen. So allow me to repeat some lines from my first post:

I was an early fan of the idea of "Wiki Loves Africa" but I have to confess that my fan status has cooled over time. I cannot claim to have done a comprehensive reseach but did some checks here and there.
So I have the impression that
a) the competition has brought a number of really beautiful photographs
b) the competition has brought lots of images which are not used anywhere in wikipedia articles (my short checks give me the impression that could be the case for the vast majority of images produced)


and I ask myself if the reason  may be that a lot of these mages is frankly unusable.
 
I remember that prize selected image showing some beautiful ladies in Massai attire knitting under a tree  (the year of adornment) which was selected in a winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless you want to document fake stereoptypes - the motive was fake...)

There is a lot of nice looking images which I do not know how to use because of their not clear labelling, unhelpful categories and useless explanations. It helps me as author nothing to see an image and a text like "traditional tools of Ghana/Malawi/etc". This is unusable and useless.

I write this not from the point of view of a lover of beauty (my taste is poor) but just simply from the view of a wikipedia author. I would love to have some  thousand images (not necessarily beautiful) which just show African villages. We know the criticism about the white spots on the African maps of knowledge. Villages back home in Germany may have less than 1000 inhabitants but 3 articles about the village, about its church and about the sports club. Images are available and people look for them.

I do not want to denigrate Wiki loves Africa but i would love to hear from others how they see the value of the results as they have been so far.  Why do we do it - what do we get from it? How can images about "play" be useful for closing the white spaces on the African map of knowledge?

Cheers, Ingo - "Kipala"
Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili user group





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On Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 6:10 PM Ingo Koll <ikoll@gmx.de wrote:

Dear fellow Wikimedians, dear Florence,

as the Wiki loves Africa 2019 competition is coming to its close I would like to bring back the question which I raised already in December 2018:

1. Do others share my impression that images from the competition are hardly ever used in wikipedia articles?

2. Do others have the impression that the present approach for Wiki Loves Africa does not help much to close the knowledge gap about Africa?

When I posted in December some participants here voiced interest but wanted to wait for a feedback fom the organizers. Such a feedback I have not seen. So allow me to repeat some lines from my first post:

I was an early fan of the idea of "Wiki Loves Africa" but I have to confess that my fan status has cooled over time. I cannot claim to have done a comprehensive reseach but did some checks here and there.
So I have the impression that
a) the competition has brought a number of really beautiful photographs
b) the competition has brought lots of images which are not used anywhere in wikipedia articles (my short checks give me the impression that could be the case for the vast majority of images produced)


and I ask myself if the reason  may be that a lot of these mages is frankly unusable.
 
I remember that prize selected image showing some beautiful ladies in Massai attire knitting under a tree  (the year of adornment) which was selected in a winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless you want to document fake stereoptypes - the motive was fake...)

There is a lot of nice looking images which I do not know how to use because of their not clear labelling, unhelpful categories and useless explanations. It helps me as author nothing to see an image and a text like "traditional tools of Ghana/Malawi/etc". This is unusable and useless.

I write this not from the point of view of a lover of beauty (my taste is poor) but just simply from the view of a wikipedia author. I would love to have some  thousand images (not necessarily beautiful) which just show African villages. We know the criticism about the white spots on the African maps of knowledge. Villages back home in Germany may have less than 1000 inhabitants but 3 articles about the village, about its church and about the sports club. Images are available and people look for them.

I do not want to denigrate Wiki loves Africa but i would love to hear from others how they see the value of the results as they have been so far.  Why do we do it - what do we get from it? How can images about "play" be useful for closing the white spaces on the African map of knowledge?

Cheers, Ingo - "Kipala"
Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili user group





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African-Wikimedians@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians

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African-Wikimedians mailing list
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians