Forwarding the initial mail Lodewijk and I send out.
-------- Originele bericht --------
Summary
of this email (sorry for long text): We did Wiki Loves
Monuments (WLM)
2010 in the Netherlands, we would like to do
Wiki Loves Monuments again in 2011, but now in Europe. This is
only possible when many chapters participate, therefore this
e-mail. To be clear: this event will only happen on a European
level if there is sufficient chapter participation to combine
efforts. Please feel free to forward to whomever you
find appropriate.
You might
have heard before about Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 in the
Netherlands. It was a highly successful photo scavenger hunt
with 12.500 submissions and over 250 participants[0]. We
recently completed a post mortem of this event with a more
extensive description and analysis [1]. However, there are still
many monuments in the Netherlands which can be
photographed, so we are considering another run for next
year - but then in a European context. Below we will explain a
bit how we got where we are, what we have in mind, and what you
could expect.
So how did
this all start? At the Dutch Wikipedia we have the windmill
project. One of the main goals was to get an article with an
image for every windmill in the Netherlands. Lists were created
of windmills per province and statistics were made on a regular
basis to track progress. This approach worked very well and made
it possible to tackle a big problem; All the windmills have an
article now.
Some
volunteers, in
cooperation with the chapter, managed to
get a dataset of all "Rijksmonumenten" (Dutch national monuments - 60.000 buildings/objects
with some historical or cultural relevance)
from the "Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed" (Dutch
national heritage organisation, RCE). This marked the birth of
the "Rijksmonumenten" project. The project uses the lessons
learned in the windmill project. The data from the RCE was
converted into lists by location and put on the Dutch Wikipedia.
The community started improving the lists by adding missing
information or adding photo's.
In June
2009 Wikimedia Nederland ran Wiki Loves Art /NL [2]
: A photo scavenger hunt in more than 40 museums. Also quite
successful (5.400
photos), but much more work intensive
because you need to keep contacts with all the museums and
usually museums are further away from people's homes than the
nearest monuments.
For 2010 we
were looking for a nice topic for a photo competition. The
"Rijksmonumenten" project was running very well so we decided to
organize Wiki Loves Monuments to give this Wikipedia project a
boost.
So, what
would a European WLM most likely look like? Let me give you an
idea of what we are thinking of, changes are open for debate of
course. Trying to incorporate the main lessons from last year in
the Netherlands into a European model, we think it might work
best if Wiki Loves Monuments is organized on a national level
primarily, but with cooperations, shared resources and
international prizes on a European level. The national contests
do not have to be identical, but some consistency would be
practical. We
are not sure yet what countries would be most successful, but
our initial hope would be EU chapter countries and Switzerland.
Basically,
Wiki Loves Monuments would run 1-30
September 2011, and participants would be allowed to submit
photos of monuments which are part of the object list. This
object list includes the address and ideally geo-coordinates of
all monuments which are allowed to participate. In each
participating country there would be some prizes available, to
be awarded by a jury for that country. The top-X of each could
be competing for European prizes.
You can find more information on how WLM 2010 was
organized on the post-mortem [1]. That also lines out in more
detail how much work it would be, and what the positive impact
could be.
Most of the
local work would be to get a database with the objects, create
object lists from that (possibly Dutch volunteers could support
you with that, they have the experience [3]) and get the
community involved on that. You would need to get communications
going, both external to the press (press releases etc) as to
participants (have a clear website in your language(s) with
explanation, rules etc), find a jury and prizes for them to
award. We can help each other with example press releases, best
practices, template and list examples and community motivation.
So, what to
do when you like this idea? Well, it would be good to first of
all check with your collegues (at the board, other members,
community) what they think of it. You probably need several
people to run such a competition over time to some extent. Next
step would be to do some analysis on your local situation: who
would be good partners (who keeps the lists of monuments?) for
you, how many monuments are there in your country, are they well
spread? What information/photos are already available of it
roughly? Are there community members involved in that kind of
topic? Definitely read the post-mortem and some relevant links
from there [1].
For the
time being, we registered www.wikilovesmonuments.eu
and are in touch with CARARE and Europeana (European cultural heritage
organizations) - who seem to be
interested in laying contacts with local cultural heritage
organizations. Hopefully that helps them to realize the European
context and impact this could have. The most important partner in each country would be the one that governs the database with all
monuments, and could release that to you. This database/list is
crucial for the success of such an event.
Please
inform us (ideally
through internal-l) when you would be
interested in joining in such European event, if there is enough
enthusiasm, we will create a special (easy to join) mailing list
to coordinate efforts to allow more volunteers to join in the
discussions. We already took the liberty of discussing this with
some other chapters, and are hopeful that it will actually get
to a first grand chapter cooperation program. Of course this
does not mean you are bound, but that you think you would like
to participate. You can also join #wikilovesmonuments on freenode irc of course if you like.
With kind regards,
Maarten Dammers
Lodewijk Gelauff
[1]:
[3]: