Tomasz and Maarten, thanks for your reactions.
Let me provide another piece of the puzzle from my perspective. Until
March, there was some on-wiki discussion concerning WLM-Russia, which I
initiated. I was involved in the creation of the lists and there were a
couple of other users working on Commons. There was very little help, or
no help at all, from WLM-2011 Russian organizers, but at least they were
aware of this on-wiki discussion, and did not object to the creation of
the lists. At some point in January, they made an announcement that they
are going to make a new database, but refused to answer how the database
will be related to the existing lists, and where they are going to take
the coordinates from. In March, I got very much concerned with the fact
that only three lists out of 83 were ready, and nothing else was going
on, so that I posted an announcement on Commons, opened a skype group
which several people immediately joined, and started to discuss what
else should be done to start the contest in time and properly. Anastasia
Lvova, the WM-RU appointed coordinator, who was quiet half a year before
that, reacted immediately, stating that she would not join the
discussion as long as I am involved, and sending a lengthy message to
this list explaining why I should not be involved. Obviously, I left the
skype group immediately and announced that I do not want to interfere
with the organization since I am apparently viewed as the main obstacle
to the contest.
Since then, all on-wiki discussion stopped. I still have all WLM-Russia
related pages on Commons (which I created earlier) on my watchlist, and
they were never edited. I guess the discussions are being held off-wiki,
but they never got out of the closed circles, and I do not even know who
exactly the organizers are. The last I heard from the organizers (it was
in March) was that only a number of regions will participate in the
contest. (Now all regions participate). On August 31, the website was
suddenly up, and apparently it is linked to the database the organizers
wanted to create. This database contains some serious errors, and, in
particular, the buildings which do not fall under freedom op panorama
are still there (and several pictures of these copyrighted buildings are
getting uploaded every day as a part of WLM and have to be nominated for
deletion). The lists on Commons, which are currently (almost) complete
on five regions, do contain indications which buildings are copyrighted,
but these lists are not related to the website in any way, their
creators quit, and I am the only one now maintaining them.
There is no on-wiki activity of the organizers at all. Some of the
users who previously identified themselves as local organizers are
active on Commons but are not doing any WLM-related work. Other users
are inactive.
Now, I do not care so much who are the organizers, how they discuss,
and what exactly they are doing. My only concern is that, since
previously they never ever showed any respect to what was done by the
others, that at some point they could suddenly do some weird things -
for instance, create their own lists, which will be inferior to these on
Commons, but still will be used in the production line, or will
introduce their own categorization system incompatible with the existing
one and then bot-recategorize everything, or smth else.
But there is probably nothing any of us can do about this. For the time
being, I will just keep categorizing the incoming WLM photos from
Russia, since they need to be categorized, and there is no way to do it
other than manually. Most of WLM-2011 Russian photos remain
uncategorized.
Cheers
Yaroslav
On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:43:40 +0200, Tomasz W. Kozłowski wrote:
Hi Yaroslav,
thanks for asking the questions, and for your amazing work done for
Wiki Loves Monuments (in Russia) so far, it's greatly appreciated!
From what I know--and I daresay I know a little
bit more about that
than Maarten due to my interest in Central and Eastern
European
countries--there are no lists of monuments in Russia from this year
that were published on any of the Wikimedia projects.
The only lists I managed to find are linked from
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Lists_of_European_Monuments/Russia>,
but they were created last year, are very well hidden and almost
completely empty, except for the few regions. There /might/ be some
lists on the Russian Wikipedia, but I cannot tell where as I am sadly
not able to read any Cyrillic at all.
As for the local organisers, I can only confirm that they do not take
part in any on-wiki discussion. Indeed, they are not active on this
list, either, and I haven't heard from them for a very (very!) long
time, even though I poked them many times in the past few weeks; my
inbox tells me that the latest e-mail I received from them was on May
25, 2012.
I also haven't heard about any plans to have a bot take care of the
uploads from Russia, so I guess you can continue doing your very
useful work if you still have the will and time to do so.
Tomasz
_______________________________________________
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org 
