Hi everyone,
As you probably know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010 in the Netherlands, 2011 in Europe and 2012 worldwide (I was one of the main organizers for those years). We managed to get a lot of monuments photographed that didn't have a photo before. In the Netherlands we also got a large collection from the local heritage organization (see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Rijksdienst_voor... ). After that, we had some sequels in the Netherlands, but attention and numbers dropped as you can see at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Monuments... .
In my opinion this is because Wiki Loves Monuments is suffering from the sequel problem: We keep repeating the same concept that worked really well in the past, but is a bit of a stale copy of what it used to be. Bit like movies where successful movies keep getting sequels. Of course this only applies to countries where WLM was done multiple times.
Just like movie franchises that have become a bit stale, we can go back to our basis and reinvent ourselves. Our basis is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Philosophy : * Make it easy * Make it fun * Make it local * Help Wikipedia * Give quick and visible results
The coverage in the Netherlands is currently 90%. So if you compare it to the first years: It's not easy to find something to photograph, not much fun finding it, probably not local (already done), it's hard to help Wikipedia because it already has a photo and no quick and visible results.
I made a query at https://w.wiki/AGP5 to give a random sample of rijksmonumenten (monuments in the Netherlands) that have an image. Clicking through it I noticed that the majority of images (80%? 90%?) is of 10 years old. A lot has changed in 10 years: The monuments might have changed and camera quality improved a lot. So my idea for 2024: Let's focus on getting new images for monuments that currently have an old image. This would be like a reset where suddenly you'll have tons of monuments to photograph nearby. We would need to update some of our tooling to find monuments to photograph and to get them used, but let's worry about that later.
What do you think?
Maarten