Well, the story he told WMF, who believed it hook, line and sinker, was that in the country it was very difficult to find professional photographers to be part of the jury (it always is, everywhere, I believe :P ) and that it would make a great difference there, giving more credibility to the contest (or something to the likes of that).

So you pay members of a closed jury, and your friends cash the money (or spare the bounty, whatever).

One of the most disastrous effects of this scheme was that it alienated the members of the wiki community who in good faith helped with the organization of WLE back then. You can imagine how donkey ears grow out of your head when you realize you have in fact been helping someone to do their paid work, on the covert of a volunteer effort.

Best,
Paulo

Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt@gmail.com> escreveu no dia sábado, 3/10/2020 à(s) 17:41:
Well, sounds like a horror story. I would personally never agree to get monetary reimbursement for participating in a WLM or a WLE jury. 

Best regards
Yaroslav

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 6:19 PM Paulo Santos Perneta <paulosperneta@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Yaroslav,

It is (was) quite easy, actually. Referring to the specific case I mentioned:

  • The organizer (who was an ex-WMF staff and member of the international WLE team) was being paid by WMF to locally organize WL contests;
  • The organizer was not transparent about this towards the community, coaching and engaging members of the wiki community, who, in the belief it was an all volunteer effort, would do his own work for free and greatly help him fulfill his objectives;
  • The organizer decided in a totally closed process who would be the winners - these routinely included offwiki friends of the organizer;
  • The jury, who allegedly participated in that closed selection process, was also paid. Again, this jury routinely included offwiki friends of the organizer;
  • On at least one occasion, an exhibition place was rented by a very expensive amount, which was never satisfactorily explained. Other costs were also apparently overfactured.
This was back in 2016. I don't believe it still works that way, thankfully.

Best,
Paulo



Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt@gmail.com> escreveu no dia sábado, 3/10/2020 à(s) 16:38:
Hi Paulo,

I have difficulties parsing your post. For Russia, after we had serious issues with Wikimedia.ru (who, for example, at some point wanted to interfere with the decisions of the jury) we converged to symbolic prizes which we essentially buy out of our own pocket and send them using our own money (things like mugs). We (a group of self-selected people) are doing everything on our own and we are not using any funding. I do not quite see how we could misuse the competition, even if we wanted to.

Best
Yaroslav

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 4:22 PM Paulo Santos Perneta <paulosperneta@gmail.com> wrote:
Forgot to say, but I'm one of the organizers of WLM for WM Portugal.

As for corruption, I must say back in 2016 or around it I was contacted offwiki on Facebook by a WLE/WLM organizer, enticing me to organize WL in Portugal, and teaching how to milk the cow. That's how bad the situation was. I'm glad things have changed since then.

Best,
Paulo


Paulo Santos Perneta <paulosperneta@gmail.com> escreveu no dia sábado, 3/10/2020 à(s) 15:12:
Hello,

In WLM since 2019 we are totally transparent about the jury members that help on montage, and usually thank them for their precious help at our blog post about the competition. Since last year, we have been exchanging jurors with Tuscany and Wiki Classics, and had a lot of help from Brazil. This year we are also exchanging jurors with Brazil. I must say it's a total PIA to find jurors for this kind of competition, so we generally gave up with finding professional photographers (which had a lot of trouble to engage with the technical part of this, anyway) and are doing this with Commoners, Wikipedians and punctually with "outsiders", which may be photographers or not - could be data journalists, ppl from the academia, etc. - to experiment. A global bank of jurors would be a precious asset.

After the last round in montage, the organizers do the final selection, using the montage results as a starting point. This is to avoid repetitions, bad quality photos, previously undetected copyvios, out of scope photos, and so on.

I absolutely support transparency in the selection process, especially given past situations where corruption, game of marked cards and schemes to get $$ out of WL competitions were at least apparent - As long as it does not hinder the selection process, and does not create additional bureaucracy.

Best,
Paulo




effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com> escreveu no dia quarta, 30/09/2020 à(s) 23:49:
Hi all,

After getting feedback both on- and offlist, we arrived at the following: the Montage developers will make a page available to each jury coordinator, that they can copy and paste to a wiki page to share their process settings easily. That way it's easy to be transparent. At some point in the future, we will likely make this public by default. 

I do express the expectation that each national coordinator will publish their jury members (either real life name or username). It may well be that we ask you to submit this list of jurors when you submit your nominees (although we will not publish it on your behalf, that is your responsibility).

Warmly,
Lodewijk

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:01 PM effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com> wrote:
All great suggestions.

In the past the WLM international team has also maintained a database of jurors to be backup. We had very little requests in recent years though, probably because so many people know organizers form other countries. If you're stuck, I would suggest to either ask someone you already know, or to ask this list. Most likely you have a response within 48h. But don't wait until the last minute, if you can avoid it. Jurors typically like a week to get things done (if the country isn't huge). 

Lodewijk

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 3:48 AM Rebecca O'Neill <rebeccanineil@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you Yaroslav, I will send you a separate email now!

Having the WLE team setting up a pool of jurors like that was so helpful Anton. Yes, I could find the names and email other WLM organisers, but this system took that extra work away from me - which was hugely appreciated, especially in our first year!

On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 at 11:45, Anton Protsiuk <anton.protsiuk@wikimedia.org.ua> wrote:
The international WLE team this year has tried to create a database of jurors from different countries for local contests. We had a Google form for these purposes (https://forms.gle/Pj61adjgYiE6Jn687) & asked local teams whether they needed help with jury.
We haven't estimated the results yet, since the local selection process is still ongoing, but it seems to have worked well.

Best Regards
Anton Protsiuk
Project Manager at Wikimedia Ukraine


On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:05 AM Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt@gmail.com> wrote:
If WLM Ireland is in September I can help as a juror. If it is in October this could be more difficult because I am also in the jury for Russia, and there is typically a lot of work there.

Generally, asking around (may be also on Commons) typically helps. In the past I have been on jury for a few different countries. Somebody would just approach me and ask.If I can make it, I agree.

Yaroslav

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 9:50 AM Mārtiņš Bruņenieks <martinsb@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Rebecca!

I have organized multiple WLM/WLE editions in Latvia. We have used Montage in most of them.
After experiencing problems with jurors dropping out or being known at the last moment, we created new Wikimedia accounts just for the jury and sent the passwords to them.

Montage allows some editing of jurors after the round has started but results can be unexpected.

 Mārtiņš


On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 2:13 AM Rebecca O'Neill <rebeccanineil@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Lodewijk,

As a slight aside to this, and perhaps something that might help ease some of the worries around judging processes in other countries, would it be an idea to have a pool of international WLM Wikimedia jurors that could help judge other countries? Here in Ireland we have done this with Malta, exchanging jurors over the past few years, and for our first WLE this year we had Axel from Sweden be on our jury. You get the benefit of a fellow Wikimedian who understands the whole process, and who could bring some different expertise or perspective to a country's WLM. Having someone who is completely unfamiliar with your local built heritage means they can assess the images with a different take than someone who knows them very well.

After 6 years, we have found it harder to recruit a jury from our pool of active Wikimedians and relevant expert judges from the arts and architecture sectors in Ireland. I know I would really appreciate it if we could "borrow" a juror from another Wikimedia group (in the past we have had some UK help with this too with jurors). We have suffered from jurors dropping out of the process at the last minute or after judging has begun (which results in having to restart rounds in Montage), generally it has been those who are not Wikimedians who perhaps did not fully understand the commitment when they agreed. Not only is it frustrating, it's very stressful. It may be less of an issue this year, given that the deadline for submitting to the international jury won't be at the end of October.

Hope that helps clarify some of the issues some of the smaller countries can face over the years of WLM!
Thanks,
Rebecca

On Wed, 2 Sep 2020 at 23:57, effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Alexander,

As for the status of Montage requests: I suggest that you start a separate thread on that, and would like to leave this to the maintainers to respond to. 

As for publishing the settings: I was imagining some kind of log-style publication, not a near write-up. This won't be pretty, but it will allow people to figure out how it worked out in practice. If we follow a logical naming convention, people should be able to puzzle it together. Ideally, the national organizers also publish their process on the website, but this log would be a way to verify that. But I accept your note that we may need to add a context explaining that more process may happen before/after this tool is used. 

Lodewijk

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 3:17 PM Alexander Tsirlin <altsirlin@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Lodewijk,

We also intend to publish by default the settings of the montage jury tool, and the number of photos in each round that the national competitions have used. We're debating whether there should be an opt-out for this year. 
This is unrealistic, because jury process may involve several campaigns that are later merged together (in Russia, we do it all the time in order to meet your submission deadline). Moreover, some of the photos can be accepted for the next round within Montage but excluded later on if we find that they do not depict cultural heritage. The end result is that any number you take from Montage will not match the number of photos that we publish (e.g., as a short-list). This will only lead to confusion and won't be of any use for anyone.

Since you mentioned Montage, let me also ask when two important pull requests, which were done by one of our team members, are going to be merged into the code:
https://github.com/hatnote/montage/pull/169
https://github.com/hatnote/montage/pull/175
These are really, really important fixes. Without them I would have a problem creating new Montage campaigns in October.

Sincerely,
Alexander


On 9/2/2020 11:49 PM, effe iets anders wrote:
Hi all,

over the past years, we have had various requests to encourage national organizers to be transparent in their judging processes and who sits on their jury. Most of the national organizers are currently transparent about this already. In the past weeks/month, more conversation around this has continued with some concerns (valid or not) on certain jury processes. 

In this light, the international team intends to institute a new expectation for national organizers, namely to publish the members of their jury (be it their username or real life name) at some point. We have not figured out the practical details yet, but I can imagine that while we encourage publication on the website, we would ask national organizers to add a list of jury members to their submission to the international jury - which we then will publish as well. 

We also intend to publish by default the settings of the montage jury tool, and the number of photos in each round that the national competitions have used. We're debating whether there should be an opt-out for this year. 

We will of course apply at least the same level of transparency to the international jury.

Before we make this decision, I would like to ask for feedback on this, and whether there are edge cases we should consider where such transparency would be harmful. I'll take 1 week to gather some feedback on this, and then we'll make a final decision. You can respond to this on this mailing list, or privately to me. 

Warmly,
Lodewijk

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Project Coordinator Wikimedia Community Ireland
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