---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Matthew Roth <mroth@wikimedia.org>Date: Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 12:21 PM
Subject: [Wmfall] Wiki Loves Monuments - US
To: "Staff (All)" <
wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
As mentioned yesterday at the metrics meeting, the organizing for WLM-US is ramping up. Sarah Stierch, Ryan Kaldari and I have been keeping a candle lit the past couple months hoping chapter and community folks would step up and organize the national event, but fearing that it might just be a SF Bay Area thing. Fortunately, in the past few weeks, folks at Wikimedia DC have stepped up (what did they organize something else big recently??) and very fortunately,
User:Smallbones has stepped up big time. Smallbones is an active member of WikiProject National Register of Historic Places (
WP:NRHP), which has spent the past 5 years organizing and categorizing the 87,000 buildings, sites, statues, and districts that make up the register. This is
the primary list that we will be using for the monuments and come September User:Multichill will turn on a neat feature that syncs the list with the Upload Wizard in Commons and automatically adds a category and the reference number associated to the list with the photos you upload. Assuming no hiccups, it's gonna rock!
At present, there are 35 countries planning to participate, up from 18 last year and located all over the world (think WLM Panama and WLM Philippines). Couple that with the new WLM app and we might have a lot of photos uploaded :)
We have a lovely website that you can check out, though it will get lovelier soon:
As of yesterday we just got our 6th member of the jury. Sarah and Smallbones made sure it's a dope jury. We'll see if a few more invitations are returned favorably, but we're quite happy with this group.
- Carol Highsmith, who has over 20k photos in the Library of Congress
- Rick Prelinger, of the Prelinger Archive.
- David Shankbone, photographer well-known for his photos of Occupy Wall Street and who has uploaded a ton of photos to Commons
- Heather Moran, photographer and archivist at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (yeah, MUNI). She's done some cool work with QR Codes and as a result of asking her to be on the jury, I imagine she and Smallbones might be collaborating on some other stuff going forward.
- Howard Cheng, Featured Picture guru/czar (insert appropriate title) who also helps run the Picture of the Year voting on Commons.
- Daniel Case, active in WP:NRHP and other photo projects.
If you're interested, we can still use help with a number of things:
- Sponsors/prizes: we need swag to lure in the newbies :) If you have connections with camera companies, please let us know. We've reached out to most of the big companies, but given the late start or given their prize policies, we're not having a lot of success yet (Canon will only give to contests where participants make 70% of their income from photography, for instance). Also connections to mobile phone manufactures, tablet makers, etc. Whatever you might have in mind, we'd love to hear from you.
- Events: we're organizing photo walks and scanathons, but we can't have too many events. Frank is going to do a wine country monument tour by bicycle (or something like that:). We'll have SF/Oakland/Berkeley pretty well dialed. But maybe a gold country road trip is in order? Trip to Los Angeles or San Diego? The state is big and the monuments are many.
- Outreach: Help us reach out to photo groups, history buffs, architectural societies, etc. I'm happy to discuss.
- Lists: In her copious free time;) Sarah is feverishly compiling the list of California Historic sites on Wikipedia. Looking at her user contributions, it seems she's through the letter K, with Kern County. I'm sure she wouldn't mind some help getting to Yuba County.
Other resources:
And it's not too early to start taking photos. It doesn't matter for the contest when you shot it, only that you upload it in September.
thanks,
Matthew
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