Hi Beat,
I've been thinking about the future too. I wanted to send something in
October, but it looks like we already started. As you know I was one of
the people who started Wiki Loves Monuments a couple of years ago and I
organized it for three years (Netherlands 2010, Netherlands/Europe 2011
and worldwide 2012) and this year I got dragged in to fix some technical
issues. We've been thinking why we are doing this long before the whole
program design and evaluation started.
Back in 2009 we did Wiki Loves Art (see
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Art_Netherlands).
We enjoyed doing this and it was quite a success. We didn't want to
repeat it at that time because it took a lot of staff time and that was
something we didn't have at that time. We did like the concept of a
photo competition.
Somewhere at the start of 2010 the Dutch windmill project achieved their
goals of having an article for every windmill. That project had been
running for a while and one of the first steps was to create lists of
all windmills in the Netherlands. We really liked the concept of lists
because this meant we had clearly (measurable) goals.
After negotiating with the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed we got the
dataset of all 60.000 Rijksmonumenten in the Netherlands. These were put
online by volunteers as lists.
Those three factors were the basis for Wiki Loves Monuments. We did a
photo competition to get these lists illustrated. We're at 80%
illustrated now by the way :-)
From 2011 we started organizing this in a federative fashion. I really
like this way of organizing something. This way everyone is going in the
same direction, but still have plenty of freedom to do things on a local
basis.
To make it clear to everyone why we're doing this and to help making
(though) decisions we wrote down
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Philosophy
.
On top of that Wiki Loves Monuments helped to start or improve
wikiprojects about cultural heritage. Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki
Loves Art are excellent instruments to establish or improve relations
with GLAMs.
At this point in time I think it's good to not do Wiki Loves Monuments
next year. We accomplished a lot and the effects are wearing off. So
what's next? I like photo competitions but we might have a bit of tunnel
vision here. Everyone seems to be focusing on doing one or more photo
competitions next year. We don't have to do anything related with photos
and we don't have to do anything this big. Bigger doesn't mean it's
better. If we keep focussing on photo competitions we become one trick
organizations.
Some lessons learned over the years:
* Clear goals and philosophy are important
* The 5 pillars (easy, fun, local, help Wikipedia, quick and visible
results) work
* We are very bad at communication as a movement, extra effort should be
invested in that
* Having lists of what we want works much better than a vague goal
* People have a hard time sticking to a timeline
* Project management is new for a lot of people. Learning some basic
project management skills help a lot
* Federative approach make it scalable
* In person events are fun!
* Copyright laws can make it very difficult
So the question for next year is: What are the goals we want to achieve?
I'll list some possible goals based on WLM:
* Help Wikipedia/wikiprojects (could be your local heritage project or
another)
* Attract new users
* Increase (photographic?) coverage of a certain subject
* Connect online and offline (increase the social coherence of your
community)
* Make people aware of the fact you can edit Wikipedia
* Capacity & community building (organizers learn how to work together
on a big project)
* Establish or improve relations with cultural heritage organizations/GLAMs
* International cooperation (work together with people from different
countries to achieve the same goals)
* Break a world record
So let's be creative. For example: We could continue with cultural
heritage. Let's organize a writing competition. You can score points by
writing or improving articles about historic buildings (monuments) in
any of the participating countries in any language. Extra points for
quality. Every country submits the n most important monuments in their
country. If you write something about one of those you get bonus points
too.
You can do a bit of brainstorming to see what else you come up with. All
these ideas and the Wiki Loves * ideas should be evaluated based on the
goals.
Maarten