Hi Lily, thanks for the update. The Montage status page hasn't been updated since 2016: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Montage/Status Michael Lily 17 September 2017 at 5:11 am Hi all, If you are a Wiki Loves Monuments organizer, jury coordinator in the national level, or a jury member, this email can contain crucial information for you. Everyone else, you can safely stop here. :) This email contains some best practices on how to run your local jury process with regards to criteria, jury membership and process. Finally, it includes some instructions on how to choose your jury tool. ==Timeline== You should plan to start the jury process as soon as the competition ends in your country, this is October 1 for many of you. :) The international team expects to receive the top 10 photos of your country no later than October 31 [0-1]. This is a strict deadline due to international jury process timeline. ==Jury coordinator== Make sure your local team has one person in charge of jury coordinations. This person will need to make sure your jury team is in place and that your jury process starts and ends on time. ==Judging criteria== While every national competition can choose the judging criteria based on the specific needs of the country, the international team recommends the following three judging criteria to be considered in the country-level jury processes: technical quality, originality, and usefulness of the photo for Wikipedia. If you are interested to learn more about these criteria, please read more about the judging criteria [2]. ==Local jury set-up== National competitions typically have a jury with at least 3 members (the more photos, the more jury members). The local jury set-up is usually defined based on the judging criteria you will choose to go with. The international team recommends that, depending on the number of photos you expect to have by the end of the contest, you have 1-3 Wikimedians (maybe those with quality/featured images on Commons), 1-3 people who are familiar or are experts in the heritage of your country (especially the monuments), and 1-3 people who are professional or (quality) amateur photographers. Of course, all jury members should be excluded from winning prizes awarded by the jury. The national jury can then nominate maximum 10 photos per country for the international finale. Putting the jury team together is local team's responsibility and we are happy to help you where we can. If you have a hard time finding a jury member for your team and you are looking for specific qualifications, please email me off-list. We can't guarantee that we will find someone for you, but we can guarantee that we will try. ==Jury process== The jury process on the national level is defined by each country. The international team recommends the following process: Round 1: Yes/No or rating The goal of this round is to lower the number of competing photos to 400-700. If your total number of pictures is less than 500, you can skip this round. Jury members are asked to vote yes/no for each photo they are shown and are requested to stick to a maximum number of ‘yes’ votes (for example, 500). Based on these votes, a set of 400-700 photos is selected for the next round. If you have many photos, you may have to repeat this round one more time to reduce the number of photos in two steps, especially if you go with Yes/No round (as opposed to rating). Round 2: Rating The goal of this round is to come to a selection of the top-50 images. Jury members are asked to rate/score each image with 1-5 stars. Based on the average from their votes, the top-50 is selected for the next round. If there are many pictures with similar scores, the coordinator can choose to select a top-40, top-60, etc. Round 2.5: Now you have a list of ~50 photos that will need to go through the final ranking process. As a jury coordinator, you can take a few steps here to make your life easier later on: * Check the license of these photos and make sure they're the correct licenses. * Check upload time, uploader ID, etc. to make sure you don't spot something that is against your local rules. * Do backward checking to make sure to a reasonable extent that the photo uploaded is the work of the uploader. There are different ways to do this. [3] * Show the photos to your jury and ask them if any of them thinks a photo should be excluded from the final round. Note that you have a jury with a diverse background and there are rare cases in which one juror sees major issues with a photo that others don't spot. Giving your jurors a chance to deliberate and discuss in case a photo needs to be removed can be helpful. If you or your jurors spot any issue that results in a photo to be excluded from the next round, create a Yes/No round with the 50 photos and remove photos that should be removed by a No vote. Note that these kind of exclusions are rare. Round 3: Live meeting or ranking The goal of this round is to arrive at a final ranking and winning pictures. If geographically feasible, the jury can meet in person. The jury tool supports an alternative method: ranking. Each jury member is asked to rank their favorite 20 photos in order. Based on this ranking, points are awarded to each photo (20 for the number 1, 19 for number 2, etc). The total number of points determines the final result. Jury members are also asked to give a reason for selecting their top images. You can use this latter information to explain why the winner was selected, an information that can be useful for your jury report and press releases. ==Jury report== We highly recommend that you document every step of your jury process: how many photos entered each round, how many jurors, how many jurors voted on each photo, the logic behind any exclusion, etc. This documentation should ideally be shared with your audience when you announce the winners of your competition. Remember, jury process is a very important in Wiki Loves Monuments. Having a sound and transparent jury process is important to build trust with your current and future participants. ==Jury tool== There are quite a few tools available for you to use for your jury process. [4] The international team develops and maintains Montage [5] and we recommend that you use this tool unless you have already used another tool in the past and would like to continue using it. Below you can find more information about Montage. ==Montage== The next version of Montage will go live some time before October 1. In this new version, we have created features and workflows based on the feedback that we have collected from the users of the tool in different campaigns: Wiki Loves Monuments, Earth, Africa, and Folk. There are two features of the tool that are worth pointing out: The tool is designed and developed in a way that can accommodate the recommended jury process explained above (yes/no, rating, ranking features are supported). The developer team will also guarantee to provide timely support (within 24 hours) starting October 1. If you're a national jury coordinator or a jury member and want to test the current version of the tool, please leave a note on the tool’s discussion page [6]. You should feel free to leave questions/comments about the tool in the same page. If you are familiar with GitHub, you can also create issues on GitHub [7] while testing the tool. Please note that the developers will continue adding features and smoothing the workflow until the end of this month when the major release happens. :) Please sign up for Montage if you haven't already done so and know you want to use it. [8] Questions and comments are welcome. Best, Lily, on behalf of the international team [0] For the countries that have a Flickr photowalk, we may need to coordinate with you for your jury process to start up to a day or two later than October 1 as we will need time to move photos from Flickr to Commons (Some walks are organized on September 30). We will work with you to find a timeline that works with your jury process in this case. [1] Unless we have already agreed for a different date with your country. [2] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/judging-criteria/ [3] https://ctrlq.org/google/images/ [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Jury_tools [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Montage [6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Montage [7] https://github.com/hatnote/montage/issues [8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Montage#Wiki_Loves_Monument… _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org