Hi Yaroslav,I agree with you on most points. I haven't had time to analyse what I think but you touch on many topics that are worthwhile to spend time on:
1) Writing articles - I think there are two main categories here to discuss; one is the number of articles that have to do with cultural heritage (see your own remarks about the translating heritage-lists), and those that have to do with specific monuments. I also think it would be great to somehow be able to use WLM as a way of stimulating article generation, but can't think of a way to do this without complicating things a lot. I also think GLAM Derby is great, so maybe there should be another event scheduled in March (organized by you perhaps?) for some "multi-lingual cultural heritage challenge". As far as I see it, this is completely outside the scope of WLM.
2) Number of monuments "scored" per list. Of course it would be great to have 100% coverage of heritage lists, but I also have enjoyed seeing beautiful detail photos come in for parts of monuments. I am an "inclusionist" rather than a "deletionist", so my gut feeling is "the more the merrier". Personally I think very few bad pictures have come in, and I feel any picture is better than no picture.
3) Participating countries - I think it would be great to have each country taking part that a) has a national heritage list, and b) has a group of people willing to commit to getting their country in the competition.
4) Timeline - the last sprint to the finish was awesome and shows yet again how the Wikipedia community can respond to a deadline. I think we all understand now why keeping to the September 1st through September 30th dates is important.
5) Meta-project rivers - do you mean Meta as in
meta.wikimedia.org, or do you mean some sort of project to create multi-lingual content on specific subjects at specific moments of the year? Sorry, I didn't get this point entirely, but both interpretations are interesting.
6) My en.wiki WLM2011 project - I wrote about this in a former mail. It was a useful experiment, but I don't think a central portal for all countries is very useful on en.wiki (especially not if we go worldwide or to Mars next year!). I think it would be great to have national WLM projects in each country's portal on the en.wiki; so a Rijkmonuments wikiproject for [[WP:Portal:The Netherlands]], and so forth. It would be great to have each country work on their own multi-language heritage lists throughout the year (see Hubert's comments). This would be dependent on en.wiki volunteers for the various countries, and these people will be hard to find and get on board for this. However, the idea of a comprehensive portal per language wiki for all countries in that language area is a good one I think (see the German one).
Thanks for posting your analysis! I feel that this year was an amazing success and am still dazzled by the result.
Jane
2011/10/3 Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki@gmail.com>
Just replying to some points.
Yaroslav M. Blanter, 01/10/2011 17:22:
> To my understanding, the purpose of WLM is a subset of WMF mission: To
> facilitate creation and propagation of free knowledge related to cultural
> heritage (specifically, monuments of architecture and history).
:-/
Not necessarily WMF mission, but Wikimedia [movement] mission, which is
broader.
> Second, I guess we should keep photos as the main target, but we should
> make it clear that we are interested in (i) photos of the monuments which
> previously had no photos; (ii) new photos of the monuments which illustrate
> some particular details not covered previously; (iii) photos which have
> superior quality
> over those previously existed.
I agree, but I think that not so great submissions should be welcome if
they're the only way someone can participate: there's no reason to
reject them, I don't think they give much more work.
Your points are already included in the rules, but they will be applied
by the jury ex post:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011/Concept#Judging_criteria>
(i) can be measured, I suppose: it would be a nice statistic.
>
> Third, I think we should start slowly moving to writing articles and have
> prizes for this. I am not sure what is the best way to organize this (one
> way for instance would be like in GLAM Derby, with a number of points for
> an article in each language depending on the quality of the article - in
> this case it needs to be sorted out whether a particular country gives
> prizes only for the articles on the languages of this country, only about
> monuments of this country or whatever, we have a year to discuss the
> terms),
I'm not so sure about it: prizes for articles have proven to be
difficult and AFAIK they've mostly failed. There are some successful
examples but it doesn't work everywhere.
> but if in 2012 articles are no part of the competition, we
> seriously risk to lose the most successful countries - those which are
> better organized and where are little or no photos left.
Not necessarily: you can choose another target to take photos of.
> * Reaching out the countries which do not participate in WLM. If a country
> is unfortunate to have no chapter, or to have an unable chapter, or to have
> a chapter not interested in WLM it still can be helped if the lists of
> monuments somehow exist. I would definitely invest time in creating the
> heritage lists for say Albania or Guatemala if there is some input provided
> somehow. This is the work for the project.
I'm not sure I understand this: how would you get the official lists
with no local contact? not to mention the importance of local promotion,
which is useful but might be not necessary (one should study the country
statistics).
> PS The will be no Analysis II from my part unless solicited.
+1 solicitation (for that matters).
Hubert, 02/10/2011 08:27:
> I very agree, that the goal, to attrakt new users with such an
> competition as long-term wikipedia-autors, is almost completely missed.
How can you say it? We have 4000 new users; we need some months to see
what they're going to do.
> This is still an inside job. Who will address those people and encourage
> them to continue with article work?
>
> I donīt know, if other countries have some person, who does the Job of
> an Wikipedia-Mediator for new users.
See
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:B%C3%BCcherw%C3%BCrmlein/Best_practices_in_mentoring_programs>
(and there's some ongoing work elsewhere).
This certainly helps; it would be interesting to see the de.wiki project
at work on German-speaking users and compare the new users retention
with other languages.
Nemo