Hi,

From my perspective as Ukrainian WLM organiser, we would prefer having no diet or, in the worst case, not very restrictive diet.

I understand the arguments of banner blindness. In the Ukrainian community we make sure that there is no other major campaign during Wiki Loves Monuments, due to strategic importance of this contest for our community. Indeed sometimes we might have two or three banners running in parallel in Ukraine, but those are lower priority campaigns with diets.

I think we ran WLM (or it was WLE) with a moderate diet once, and this resulted in frequent cases of potential participants getting lost (e.g. asking us on Facebook what the dates are, or not being able to find the upload link). Note that participation in WLM is not always immediate: people often notice the banner, get the idea (cool, I need to picture a monument!), picture the monument the following weekend and want to upload them — but may fail to find the banner.

Another weakness is alphabet: Ukrainian uses Cyrillic alphabet (Вікі любить пам'ятки / ВЛП), while the international campaign uses Latin alphabet (Wiki Loves Monuments / WLM). Unless you remember exactly the name (which rarely happens when you see the banner exactly once), you will probably take a while to find what you need without a banner.

The worst thing is that any diet disproportionately affects newbies, as experienced Commons contributors know what WLM is and how to find it. And this is really bad for WLM Ukraine, as we have a quite big community of experienced photographers who will participate anyway, but we really want to attract new contributors who never uploaded a picture to Commons (or even never edited any Wikimedia project) before. WLM is quite good at it, please do not make it weaker. If you set a diet, please make it minimal (e.g. show the banner on every second page). It would absolutely not meet its purpose if an uploader has to wait for a week (or several days) to see the banner again.

And of course an A/B test before any change is the best solution.

Mykola (NickK)
WLM Ukraine

13 серпня 2021, 01:57:57, від "Platonides" <platonides@gmail.com>:

Great point, Lodewijk

We should ideally be able to measure the relationship between sitenotice and contributors. And, if we currently don't have enough data for that, design WLM in such a way we will be able to measure that so it can be used for future contests.

There is probably a chain of # banner impressions → # visits to contest page → # users actually paying attention → # users participating

While the absolute number of visits to the contest page coming from sitenotice should be relatively simple to count, the number of people that viewed will depend on the campaign configuration and the presence of other campaigns at the same time (e.g. fundraising), plus on the actual traffic received from that country (probably complicated, but could be calculated) plus the actual configuration of the user hiding the banner or the diet restricting the number of times it is shown per device.

Then, we have an additional handicap that our reaction won't be immediate.Users are unlikely to have photos of designated Monuments without an image sitting on their computer ready to be uploaded. If a user is going to actually find a suitable nearby monument in the list, plan a trip with its camera (next weekend, perhaps?), actually go out and shoot it, come back, locally review their photos, select good ones and upload them... It will take several days, so the effect of the impressions won't be clear. Furthermore, repeated impressions may be needed to remind them that they intended to actually tak some photos.

Whereas most people will simply think "Oh, nice project" and let other people do that work, without wishing to be bothered any more about WLM.

I don't think we actually have the resources to properly measure this, with all its variables. Perhaps we could recruit some help from the Analytics / Product Analytics teams?

Best regards
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