We're well on our way for organizing Wiki Loves Monuments 2012! With already many countries confirmed, and working on their local organization, it starts to look all exciting. With many new countries on board, it is probably helpful to explain a bit better what Wiki Loves Monuments is all about, and why certain parameters have been chosen in the past. This email will contain a bit background information about the philosophy we had in mind, and several useful (in-text) links too.

First of all I would like to share some thoughts about the goals we usually have in mind when we were talking about organizing a Wiki Loves Monuments in the Netherlands. Because although it seems pretty obvious that the many photos that are collected are a big advantage, that was at least for me personally not the main reason to organize. My main incentive was to make more people aware of what Free licenses are all about, and to make people aware that they can add content to Wikimedia projects. Let them take that first step, and allow then the community to welcome those people. It is a wonderful outreach opportunity, but also an 'inreach' opportunity. We bring the core communities in contact with motivated photographers who have quality content to share.

At the same time, it is a way to motivate the volunteers who normally edit WIkipedia, to go a little step further - and help a little big in the organization. Because it is a reasonably well outlined event - but still gives plenty of freedom, it is a great opportunity to try out how to organize something in your country if you're not actively doing so. It also is a breeding ground for further collaborations with cultural heritage institutions which you may not have had contacts with yet. I would dare to say we have been successful with that. More than 200 volunteers collaborated in 18 countries. More than 5000 people uploaded images, of who 4000 never contributed anything to Wikimedia. More than 160.000 images were released for usage on Wikimedia projects.

You may already have found the Concept page on Wikimedia Commons which contains basic documentation about how the Wiki Loves Monuments looks like. There are some important principles we try to keep constantly in mind, which are in our understanding of the past two years the reason for its success. They may seem intuitive to some, but the consequences are unintuitive to many.

First of all, it is important that it is easy to participate. The threshold should be as low as possible for people who have never uploaded anything. This is both technically (easy upload forms) but maybe just as important: socially. We should not throw up rules which are not absolutely necessary, and be as welcoming as possible. Lets just accept it that there will be some low quality images, because thanks to lower thresholds, there will also be more high quality images. Lets not bother the new users too much with our obsession with categories, templates and layout - but let us focus on welcoming them, and suggesting how they can easily write articles about their object of interest: cultural heritage.

It should of course be fun to participate. This sounds obvious, but many things can make it a lot less fun. For example, bureaucratic measures such as sending permission emails and (again) adding categories. Lets try to take that away from them, and for example think through the upload process in such a way that emails are not necessary (only own work). No categorization is strictly necessary (use the available databases to automatically categorize based on the identifier). But also, organize events, thank people. Something we can improve on this year by the way, is a thanking/badge system for participants. If there is anyone willing to take this up, I would warmly welcome that (please create a separate thread about that).

Where-ever you live, participating should be nearby home. This is similar to easy to participate, but very practical: we don't want people to have to travel long distances to get to a monument. Lets try to use a definition for monuments that allows many people to photograph monuments nearby their home. For your comparison: the Netherlands has 60.000 monuments on a population of 17 Million. This may be at the higher side of the range, but it seems to work just fine. You may for example consider adding 'state-level' or 'province-level' monuments if you want more objects. Think out loud and definitely ask for input if you think you have very few monuments. Don't worry about not completing the list with a photo for every object: that is not the goal. If we cover 10% in one contest, that is a major achievement. Nearby home is not *just* important because of the time, but also because people are proud of their own area, and want to tell the rest of the world about it!

We learned that for many people the main reason to participate is to Help Wikipedia. We should incorporate that in all our messaging. They care about prizes to some degree, but especially the super-participants with many uploads, and the many people who just upload their vacation pictures because they have them anyway, will mainly participate because they want to help. Those are also the people who are more likely to stick around. This is also why it is so important to have the monument lists on Wikipedia, and use the images there.

Finally, it is imperative that participants get quick and visible results. If they upload something, we should try to have a mechanism to actually being used. Maarten created a wonderful bot to make suggestions which images can be used where. I'm sure he will share that in more detail later on, but this is why online volunteers are also important during the contest. If we can put up images on the lists quickly, that has two major effects: people see that their contributions have an actual impact, and will continue to participate, but also they will be able to focus on the monuments that need their help most: monuments without a photo, or a very bad photo. By adding the contributions to the lists quickly, we avoid that they are disappointed because someone else already created a photo which was waiting, while they were taking the photo.

Please try to keep these lessons in mind when organizing your contest. Internally, this translates to two good practices: Communicate often, communicate well both inside your group as with other countries. And also: Keep it Simple.