Hi all,
As of 2017-10-01 almost all Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 campaigns are closed. Now is a good time to give an update about the Flickr collaboration. Some of you as organizers of countries with photos submitted through Flickr collaboration have been contacted already by us, this is a more detailed email to give more general information about this collaborations.
I'd like to start by saying that we found the collaboration with Flickr in 2017 something very valuable that we would like to learn more from, continue, and improve on in the following years. Our friends in Flickr spent a lot of time and love on this collaboration, and this was great to watch. We are also grateful to all of the Flickr users who stepped up to organize a photowalk in their city and to those of you who created connections between your photowalks and theirs.
Here is some more to share:
* All cities that organized a photowalk to be surfaced on Flickr are listed at https://www.flickr.com/groups/2581696@N23/discuss/72157684767493213/72157684...
* The rules of the contest were communicated with Flickr users at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2017/Photowa... and the organizers of the campaign on Flickr end worked with their community closely to answer any question that came up during the month of September.
* In the month of September, in total 1482 photos got uploaded to the corresponding Flickr group. From this count, 12% of the photos has the correct license [1], a hard requirement for us to be able to move the photos to Wikimedia Commons and help them participate in the contest. The percentage of those with the correct license that had appropriate monument and country ID was significantly less. (Some of them we have not found a home for, yet.[2])
* Our friends at Flickr worked hard to communicate with those who uploaded the photos that the licenses of the photos should match certain license requirements. It is not clear to us at this point why more photographers didn't decide to switch their licenses. There can be many reasons for this and we want to learn more about them. (We are looking forward to work with the Flickr team to collect some information about this.)
* We want to understand if there are ways we can help more Flickr photographers join such an initiative in the future. We need to understand what the blockers were. We have our own guesses, but again, we're looking forward to work with the Flickr team and those of you who were more involved with this initiate this year to learn more.
It was great for us to have the opportunity to work with the Flickr community in 2017 and we look forward to repeating this in the future years.
And as always: comments and questions are welcome.
Best, Lily
[1] User:Multichill wrote a script to bring those to Commons and they now live at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Monuments... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Monuments...
Lily, 09/10/2017 01:37:
- Our friends at Flickr worked hard to communicate with those who
uploaded the photos that the licenses of the photos should match certain license requirements. It is not clear to us at this point why more photographers didn't decide to switch their licenses. There can be many reasons for this and we want to learn more about them. (We are looking forward to work with the Flickr team to collect some information about this.)
It's a remarkable development to have Flickr itself communicate directly with Flickr users about free licenses. Once they are comfortable with the method, we could use some more communication of this kind, e.g. to users who selected unfree licenses or authors of photos automatically determined to be about some subject without a photo on Commons.
Wikimedia users have cooperated a lot with Flickr users and we have some model letters: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Flickr_files/Appeal_for_license_c... * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Russavia/Flickr-letter
Notice how the Italian language letter (which I often use) contains a link to Yahoo Answer, where we posted a tutorial on how to find the relevant buttons etc.: we could not find one on Flickr itself. Licenses on indidual photos are very well hidden since the 2013 redesign: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2013-May/006840.html . So it will be nice to see if Flickr staff encounters the same issues we had and figures out how to solve them (possibly in a way we have not even anticipated).
Nemo
wikilovesmonuments@lists.wikimedia.org