Images that have no monument go directly against the rules of the competition. So I see nothing wrong in not letting them to compete for the international prizes. But for me it's surprising to see some rather small-sized, watermarked and low quality images among the best. Could it be due to the selection process? (read: can we fix something there to ensure better quality stuff ending up in final) Regards, Ivo 2015-10-31 23:19 GMT+02:00 Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>rg>:

Thanks for the feedback. I guess my main struggle is: who am I to decide it is or is not a monument :) Apparently, the national team allowed it as 'a monument' - should I take their authority for it? Or make my own judgement (but of course, ask for their arguments)? Anyway, just to clarify: I don't want to 'shame' anyone, these were just examples that I could provide because they were published. Also: opinions and taste about quality will differ. But that choice is really up to the national juries, and if the quality is low, they will quickly end up on the lower end of the pool. But that is another discussion! Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 11:04 PM, Mykola Kozlenko <mycola-k(a)ukr.net> wrote:

Hi All, We have had a similar problem in Thailand. Our team member raised a concern of what should be in the photo. The government maintains a list of recognised "ancient" monuments according to the law. To the general public, what appear on the list are old temples/churches, schools, palaces, hospitals, etc. We have had a serious discussion if specific object(s) must be in a photo or it must be taken just in the vicinity of an officially listed monument. WLMTH/WLETH organising team finally adopted the second eligibility criteria for a few reasons: - The list provided to participants only tells them the place/location - not a specific object. - The jury can rule on case by base basis on the merit of an individual photo. - As a national team in this federated contest, we believe that we have an authority to interpret the definition in our local context. Back to Lodewijk's concern, there are two principles that must be upheld: 1. Agreements between the local team and the international team: Do they agree that the local team must have a national list? Does the country eligible in the first place to participate in WLM? Rather than disqualifying photos individually, I am in favour of letting all of them pass (to honour your agreement with the national team) or fail all of them (until the local team rectify their own problem). The jury team can still make their judgment after this step. 2. Transparency of the process: If a photo or a whole country is excluded for any reasons, public explanation should be made. P.S. Thanks everyone again for all the good years with the competitions WLMTH (2013-2015) and WLETH (2015). WMTH is planning for our activities for 2016. The current format of WLM/WLE may not suit our local context and we may have to leave or renegotiate the terms of participation. This may be discussed in a separate email with the international team of both competitions in the near future. Best, Taweetham WMTH On 1 November 2015 at 04:19, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org> wrote:

This is a tough problem, Lodewijk. It's our first year so I can only share our experiences and let you and others with more experience decide what the right thing to do is. Independent of your decision, it's great to see how much you care to make the right choice. :-) On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 12:27 AM, Nicu Buculei &lt;nicubunu(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: +1, the case of each country can be very different and in the absence of a standard/globally accepted way to register monuments, it's hard to make decisions with very limited local input. Here are the two examples we ran into in Iran's contest this year: 1) We had two questions early on about the unlisted monuments and whether people can upload photos for those. The two examples that I heard were the Caspian Sea (which resonates with the Nile river photo) and Milad Tower <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milad_Tower> in Tehran. In both cases, I told the users that they cannot upload these photos as part of the contest since they are not registered. (Milad Tower is one of the most iconic towers/buildings in Tehran and I would count it as a monument if the formal registration wasn't a concern.) 2) We ran into an uploaded photo of a monument with no ID, too, and we decided to keep it. Here is a longer version of the story and how we decided to move forward: We have the Cyrus' tomb <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomb_of_Cyrus_the_Great.jpg> as part of the top 10 photos with no monument ID associated with it. In this case, Pasargadae which is an area that includes the Cyrus' tomb has a monument ID, but Cyrus' tomb itself seems not to have one, and we decided that we can consider the photo from Cyrus' tomb as a photo of Pasargadae, and then later figure out if it needs to be registered on its own as well or not. But, we didn't manually add the ID to the photo. In this case, it seems to us that it was confusing to the uploader what monument he/she had to choose (all the uploaders' other photos are associated with monument IDs), and it seemed the uploader had decided to go ahead and upload anyway. We accepted this upload. Best, LilyOfTheWest

On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 2:54 AM, Nicu Buculei &lt;nicubunu(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: yup. That's what we did, we said there are 26K plus monuments you can upload for that are listed, and anything outside of that won't be considered. Makes sense. I'll do that. L -- LilyOfTheWest

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 12:49 PM, ecemaml @ es.wikipedia &lt;ecemaml(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: [...] Note that the respective watermark falls under "discouraged", not "unacceptable": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Watermarks -- nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/

Same thing here in Brasil. During WLE some people posted pictures accepting the CC-BY-SA license but added "All rights reserved" on the watermarks :-) Rodrigo Padula Coordenador de Projetos Grupo Wikimedia Brasileiro de Educação e Pesquisa http://www.wikimedia.org.br 21 99326-0558 ---- Em Qui, 05 Nov 2015 10:15:08 -0200 Rebecca O'Neill &amp;lt;rebeccanineil(a)gmail.com&amp;gt; escreveu ---- Just as a note from the Irish team, when we contact the winner who has an image with a watermark, we request that they upload one without. Generally it is just that people don't understand that it is not best practice on Commons, and it is just habit that photographers add them. On 5 November 2015 at 12:12, Nicu Buculei &amp;lt;nicubunu(a)gmail.com&amp;gt; wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 12:49 PM, ecemaml @ es.wikipedia &amp;lt;ecemaml(a)gmail.com&amp;gt; wrote: &gt; Just a quick watching of the available pictures promoted to the &gt; international phase and some questions, comments, remarks... [...] &gt; Pictures with watermarks: &gt; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baldunngan.jpg Note that the respective watermark falls under "discouraged", not "unacceptable": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Watermarks -- nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/ _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org -- PhD candidate at the University of Hull - Media &amp; Memory Research InitiativeDeputy Chairperson of Wikimedia Community Ireland Blogs rebecca-oneill.com and The Restless Curator _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Rodrigo Padula wrote: This is something worth to investigate: they didn't understand (or didn't notice) the license requirement, or due to laziness left unchanged the pictures they already had with a watermark on them? nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/

I noted both cases here, laziness and a case of a photographer that requested to delete all pictures upload during the when he really understood what CC-BY-SA means. Rodrigo Padula Coordenador de Projetos Grupo Wikimedia Brasileiro de Educação e Pesquisa http://www.wikimedia.org.br 21 99326-0558 ---- Em Qui, 05 Nov 2015 10:46:00 -0200 Nicu Buculei&amp;lt;nicubunu(a)gmail.com&amp;gt; escreveu ---- On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Rodrigo Padula wrote: &gt; Same thing here in Brasil. &gt; &gt; During WLE some people posted pictures accepting the CC-BY-SA license but &gt; added "All rights reserved" on the watermarks :-) This is something worth to investigate: they didn't understand (or didn't notice) the license requirement, or due to laziness left unchanged the pictures they already had with a watermark on them? nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/ _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org

On Thursday, November 5, 2015, ecemaml @ es.wikipedia &lt;ecemaml(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: (Iran) had to use a rule to break ties or otherwise we would end up with 11 pictures. If going beyond 10 is an option, I'd like to discuss it a bit more to make sure we give our participants the same chance other countries are providing to theirs. :) Thanks, LilyOfTheWest Best regards -- LilyOfTheWest

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 5:47 PM, LilyOf TheWest wrote: Look at the page, nobody provided more than 10 pictures: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2015_winners Indeed, France listed 13, but there are 10 of them marked as 1st - 10th and then 3 "special prizes". Of course only the first 10 go to the international contest: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2015_winners#France -- nicu :: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/

Hi all, first of all: thanks for all the input! Very helpful to read this additional info and thoughts. In this thread some points came up that could indeed use some factual clarification: - Every country is different. Each country has a slightly different definition of monuments. That is nothing new, and we will always have to work with that. For example, some countries have a definition including ships, and some have even a few trees on their national heritage list. Some flexibility with regards to what is being photographed is therefore always necessary. One of the biggest differences is the size of the objects. Some countries recognize a whole city as one monument. That must mean that a photo of a part of a monument, also counts as a photo of a monument. This is the same as we did in the past. - We actually all have the same rules in the international competition, but countries can derive from that in their national competition. However, those nominated pictures will be treated equally in the international finale. You can allow watermarks in your national competition, but I can predict that the odds that a watermarked picture scores into the top-10 of the international finale is very low. Theoretically however, a picture could 'make up' for the downside of the watermark. It is not a hard requirement. - Countries can award as many prizes as they want. However, they can only /nominate/ 10 of them for the international finale. Theoretically, those don't have to be the top-10. In the past, countries have nominated the top-7 of the main category, and the winners of three special categories. But always maximum 10 per national competition. - For most of the other issues, I refer back to the judgement criteria: Technical quality, Originality and Usefulness on Wikipedia. If you only photograph a little snake that is in the garden of a monument with nothing of the monument visible, it is not useful for Wikipedia in the context of that monument. If you add big watermarks, it is not only low on technical quality, but also barely useful. These criteria have been the same in the past five years, and cannot be a surprise. Most issues where you think an image is 'wrong' are fixed by sticking to these criteria. With regards to yes or no monument on the photo, which was the original question, I will take the approach that I only worry about the images that are likely to score high. If they do, I will get in touch with the national team, and see if they can help identify the monument. If not, and there is not an identified monument on the picture, I will propose disqualification to the jury. In the end, the jury will decide on this. Thanks for your input in this tough question! Best, Lodewijk On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 4:54 PM, LilyOf TheWest < lilyofthewest.wikimedia(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: