Sorry, I have to disagree with this. I was a jury member for Russian competition, the majority of the jury were the community members (we are special because we are based on Wiivoyage, not on Wikipedia as everyone else, but this is not relevant), and we spent quite some time deliberating how to select the final ten winners. It was not easy, and not everybody agreed with everything, we had to go through several rounds of voting and discussions, but in the end I feel we have done a good job (though I am sure a lot of people are not going to like what we selected, we already got some criticism from the community). And I did not check the numbers but I think we have stable high participation which is either growing or oscillating year to year, but definitely not steadily declining (but at some point probably we will have all the monuments photographed, and it would starts going down, which is natural).

Best Yaroslav

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 3:42 PM Wilfredo Rodríguez wilfredor@gmail.com wrote:

As usual I am not very happy with the result of the WLM evaluations (Maybe they should take into account the community by selecting juries among commons users and not clubs or photographers of interredicha quality who don't know the criteria of our community). I remember having stopped participating in WLM Venezuela since the winners were selected with Facebook likes also the best photographer in commons of Venezuela withdrew from commons due to this problem (User:Paolostefano1412 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Paolostefano1412). In the case of Canada, I don't know how the photographs were evaluated and it would be very easy to say from my winning position (I won 5 pictures of the top 10) that I agree with the results but no, I think there were many better photos even than the first place that were not selected, It also leaves much to think about the third place that is not even a monument. Anyway, it is already something known, these contests say absolutely nothing, and every year they lose more participation _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org

Pe luni, 11 noiembrie 2019, Wilfredo Rodríguez wilfredor@gmail.com a scris:

As usual I am not very happy with the result of the WLM evaluations (Maybe they should take into account the community by selecting juries among commons users and not clubs or photographers of interredicha quality who don't know the criteria of our community). I remember having stopped participating in WLM Venezuela since the winners were selected with Facebook likes also the best photographer in commons of Venezuela withdrew from commons due to this problem (User:Paolostefano1412 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Paolostefano1412). In the case of Canada, I don't know how the photographs were evaluated and it would be very easy to say from my winning position (I won 5 pictures of the top 10) that I agree with the results but no, I think there were many better photos even than the first place that were not selected, It also leaves much to think about the third place that is not even a monument.

Hi Wilfredo,

Why don't you get in contact with the organizers and ask them to include you in next year's jury? This way you will have a say in how the pictures are evaluated and those other (better, in your view) photographers will have a better chance.

This is exactly what happened with last year's winner in Romania and I believe he made for a very good jury member :)

Anyway, it is already something known, these contests say absolutely nothing, and every year they lose more participation

The more years a country has organized WLM, the harder it is to get diverse monuments into the contest. This in turn makes it harder to use the images on the projects, which is something the grant team looks at when giving you the money to organize.

Some contests then concentrate on having great images, while other concentrate on monuments diversity and the international organizers aim for more abstract targets, as Lily described above. That means that the local contest might not necessarily say anything about your photography skills, but that's OK - there are always other events in our community that you might want to consider participating in.

Strainu Former WLM organizer and current critic. :)