Peter Ekman, 04/09/2013 17:41:
My first reaction to the Metro contest is that they have an awesome "jury tool". Check it out - maybe we could try for something like this for next year.
That's however more like a popularity contest and it works if there are many viewers/voters i.e. if the website is a sort of event in itself.
2nd - They have a claim to be the "World's largest" however tentative, and we have a better claim. We could ask them to cease and desist making the claim, but they would likely just ignore us, and there's nothing we could do about it.
A possibility would be some sort of cooperation for next year with Metro, i.e. their very large readership could contribute to WLM. With our limited (but extensive) lists, that would likely be very difficult for them, but maybe with a different competition on our part something could be done, e.g. "Wiki Loves Your Hometown"
Yes, that would be awesome and it's why I checked their website in the first place. They also cover some countries where we have been unable to set up a WLM and they obviously have very good outreach capabilities. It's not entirely clear to me what their purposes are, but they don't seem incompatible with ours: their main desire may be to grow/build upon the sort of extensive grassroot photojournalism community they seem to have in some countries; it doesn't seem to be growing some specific photo hosting service (they just use instagram; we, too, have used flickr), nor to keep exclusive commercial rights on the contents (the photo book they publish looks like a reward/celebration, not a commercial initiative). Finding a common topic may be tough but should not be impossible, especially if some countries exhaust "monuments" and switch to something else as sometimes mentioned in the past (Wiki Loves rivers/lakes/...).
Nemo