Hello Matthew,
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:39 AM, Matthew Roth mroth@wikimedia.org wrote:
WLM-US organizers have been discussing the value of setting up a community voting process on-wiki for the initial selection of the top 500 or so photos in the WLM-US pool, which we will then send to the judges (though we're thinking it would be wise to have the judges also surface photos they like that don't make the top 500). Can anyone on this list (particularly Russian organizers) give us feedback on what works well and what does not work well?
For us it was important to involve community to the contest; may be you know that ~90%+ of our participants in 2011 were newbies, and we need to do a great work to include active users in the future. In the last summer people said 'Why do we need WLM at all? No one is forbidden to walk and take pictures of buildings without competition', and at last time people says about WLM as about an interesting and useful expirience (but the problem with an interest of community still exists because of unfreedom of panorama, lack of people and so on). But we used the poll as the second stage, not the first; we had 10 nominations, each of it has it's own purpose, and our jury made a shortlist. In this year we're doing the site for voting and trying to find an ideal solution - may be social network competition, with a demonstration who has been the most active in the evaluation of photographs, with checking on the reasonableness of this activity.
Did you reach out to Commons contributors who had helped with any of the Featured Picture selection or Picture of the Year voting for feedback?
Yes, last year we used Kalan's script, that was created for POTY.