Wiki Loves Monuments has as goal to get more images of cultural heritage on our platforms (among other goals). We want at least one photo for every monument.

For most countries I think it is impossible to reach that goal without tourists contributions.

Our goal is also to share knowledge from everywhere in the world with everyone. Creating boundaries on who in sharing and participating is unnatural and I think it will in the end be harmful.

If you organise Wiki Loves Monuments you need to define your goals.  A goal can be getting more photos of not photographed monuments. Then the best is a positive approach by awarding prizes to those who contribute to that goal. A goal can be getting a large bulk of photos, then you can award mass uploaders. A goal can be to build a community, then you can award local community members. Etc.

It is anyhow important to explain why awarding in certain extra categories takes place: to get a certain positive outcome.

So think positive!

So please don't think of tourists as foreigners, but as people that took the effort to specially visit tour country and they upload images from your country because your country and heritage is worth it and important to the world.

Romaine



PS: In 2011 (and other years) there was an informal contest: which contributor could contribute to the most country contests as possible, not so much to win, but to share more so Wikimedia has a better coverage.



Op vrijdag 2 december 2022 schreef Philip Kopetzky <philip.kopetzky@gmail.com>:
Hi!

It probably depends on what you want your competition to be for. There are easier and less expensive ways of encouraging quality images and the international competition hasn't changed it's taste of pictures in many years. These considerations should not play as an important role for local organisers as trying to foster a photography community in your country that can then also go on to do more important documentary work.

Best,
Philip

On Fri, 2 Dec 2022 at 06:07, Bodhisattwa <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

As told in earlier mails by many others, national rules of WLM totally depend on local organizers and they are free to restrict participation in their context. But that also means any restrictions might lead to less number of quality images and that can reflect in the international competition where those photographs are going to compete with the best photographs of other nations.

For Indian part of WLM, the rule is simple -
  • We accept and judge photographs of Indian monuments from photographers of any nationalities. If a foreigner finds a way to top 10, we have some legal restrictions to send prizes to their addresses but we try to figure out some other ways to do that.
  • We award prizes to top 10 photographs. We don't care if some of them come from a single photographer. if a photographer uploads better images than others, we don't find any reason to reject them and push other photographs from behind to the top. That would not give justice to that photographer and to the quality of the competition.
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
WLM India


On Thu, 1 Dec 2022 at 21:58, Mykola Kozlenko <mycola-k@ukr.net> wrote:
Hi,

You can actually do this both ways.

Firstly, indeed you can create participation restriction whatever way you want (e.g. residents of Suriname only). The only restriction is your national legal constraints. In some countries they allow only local residents to win prizes because of legal requirements, in other countries it might be illegal to deny participation to foreigners.

Secondly, you may well create special nominations for locals and/or foreigners if you want and you consider it justified. We experimented this in Ukraine a few times.
For example, once we had a special prize for a photo made by a foreigner (with the winner even coming to Kyiv to the award ceremony - obviously it was before the Russian invasion) because we had a partner interested in it and we wanted to reach the audience of tourists and/or expats.
On another occasion we had a special prize for a photo made by a (Ukrainian) secondary school student - because we had a partner working with this audience and we saw this as a great opportunity to encourage participation there.
In both cases people could contend for main prizes and for the specific prize. In all cases it was primarily based on self-identification (we required users to tick a box or sign on a page if they wanted to participate in this special nomination.

I would honestly recommend the later approach - try to identify potential audience (e.g. local students, members of a local photographic society etc.) and introduce a special award for them. This does encourage participation without discouraging others.

Mykola (NickK)
WLM Ukraine

1 грудня 2022, 16:53:41, від "effe iets anders" <effeietsanders@gmail.com>:

I can well imagine this. At the same time, I can appreciate the concerns that I read as underpinning this question: how can we create an environment where the people living in country X, feel that they have a fair chance to actually win the competition, rather than all prizes being scooped up by tourists with better cameras (note the distinction between inhabitants and nationals, in this context). If your goal is to use the competition to build a local community, I can understand such a rule as an intuitive response. 

That being said, I think I made my point about whether this might or might not be the most appropriate way to approach this challenge. I just wanted to make sure that what I suspect is other side of the argument is also clear. 

Warmly,
Lodewijk

On Thu, Dec 1, 2022 at 4:28 PM Jan Ainali <ainali.jan@gmail.com> wrote:
While each country organizer is free to make whatever silly rules they want, I would be furious if an affiliate chose to deny me from participating in a Wiki Loves X where I live just because I am not from that country, unless they were legally required to do so. 
I would even be angry if someone rejected my holiday photos as well.
This is contrary to everything about collaboration Wikimedia holds dear.

Jan Ainali

Den tors 1 dec. 2022 kl 14:57 skrev Michelle van Lanschot <vanlanschot@wikimedia.nl>:
Dear everyone,

The WLM Suriname team will soon be evaluating this years competition, and we have two questions we would like to ask your advice on:
1. The winner of this year's competition was not from Suriname, but from the Netherlands. This has caused some criticism from the local community. Is it possible to only accept contributions by natives of Suriname?
2. This year's top ten has 7 pictures from the same uploader. How would we go about avoiding this next year?
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!

Best regards,

Michelle van Lanschot
Projectleider

(ma, di, wo, do)

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