This is not the first time this topic has come up - every time it is about throwing up thresholds for photographers because we believe that it increases quality. Actually, we learned that it doesn't. The lower the thresholds, the less restrictions we put on people, the more submissions we will get. Please note that we are not *just* caring about that one single perfect shot, but we want people to upload multiple pictures! If they want to upload 100 pictures of a church, who do they hurt other than the jury members? I have been told that many slightly different pictures could in the future even perhaps be used for 3D image generation. But even for now I have more than once searched for a slightly different angle of a photo because I wanted it for a specific purpose. And I can tell you from experience that a jury is very good at ignoring a set of 100 very similar photos. That is much easier than choosing between two good quality photos. 

Everyone who didn't read it yet, I'd recommand  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Philosophy  . It gives a consise overview of what Wiki Loves Monuments is all about, and why we have made certain choices. In that same philosophy, I believe that imposing upload restrictions is bad - bad for moral, bad for quality and bad for free content. Another popular restriction I strongly oppose is requiring a minimum amount of pixels. The only thing it helps for, is to make it easier to manage the work load. Throwing up a threshold is a very effective way to scare off especially the newcomers - Wikipedians will upload anyway. And that is one of my main goals this contest - get more people to do their uploads to Wikimedia Commons instead of Facebook. Get people to realize that it is quite doable to upload your pictures on Commons, and that they even may get used on Wikipedia that way. That free licenses are not evil. 

So please, lets try to keep the thresholds low - lets give people freedom in uploading as many photos from monuments as possible. 

Best,
Lodewijk

2012/6/22 Jan Ainali <jan.ainali@wikimedia.se>
While making it as easy as possible for the jury, let's not forget the purpose of the contest, to get educational pictures of as many monuments as possible. There need to be an incentive for photographers to not be satisfied with just uploading their best image. Uploading with metadata is a pain, and if  they are not entering the contest the risk is that we will miss out of some educational pictures that may not be the prettiest. The contest is our carrot to make people upload, and if the carrot is smaller not all will chase for it.

I think Racso is on to something though, by limiting it to a certain number per monument. The limit must be higher than one, eg. for a church the interior is at least as interesting as the exterior for one thing and while the photographer thinks one of them has better chance to win, maybe the other is of most value to the projects. Perhaps ten is enough, that could make those photographers that upload hundreds of picture of each monument less overwhelming. Can we do such a limitation technically, or do we make it as a strong recommendation to the contestants or solve it in another way?

-- 
Best
Jan Ainali

2012/6/22 Nicu Buculei <nicubunu@gmail.com>
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 3:19 AM, Peter Ekman wrote:
> It seems to me that you can't possibly give a jury a 1,000 photos and expect
> them to come up with anything reasonable.  That type of system would also
> drive away quality jurors - the best jurors simply wouldn't have time for
> all that.  And if we're talking about 10,000 photos, it just gets worse.
>  There has to be some sort of pre-screening, whether we like it or not.

A jury put in front of 1000 or more photos would have a difficult job,
but with a pre-screening you can get to a few hundreds of images and a
reasonable amount of work.

> A couple of suggestions for pre-screening:
> 1.  Let the photographer decide which of his photos is best - say 1 for the
> entire contest or 1 for each day he/she uploads.
> 2. Have a contest each day, with a each photographer who uploaded that day
> nominating a single photo, and letting the community vote (I'd say +1 for
> each photo you like) then after a few days a selected screener from the
> community selects 2 or 3 photos from the group that has the highest score.
>  After 30 days, you'd have 60-90 photos that the jury can deal with, each
> photog would have had the chance to nominate his best photos (multiple
> times), the community would have their say, and the screeners would not have
> to deal with 1,000s of photos.

Something like that would require a large organizational effort and a
large community, which is not the case for most of the participating
countries. Small teams and small communities will have to "Keep It
Simple and Stupid". [1]


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

--
nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/






_______________________________________________
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu