Little update about arranging Wiki Loves Monuments in Bangladesh. As you know we're arranging this even for the first time, and we have a really small number of volunteers to work on this. We have created our on-wiki list in Bangla Wikipedia which can be found at http://bit.ly/JtrBCt -- this is a list of 391 monuments in Bangladesh. This list is indeed incomplete, but that's the only list we found out from Department of Archeology, Bangladesh. We had an idea to find out the monuments with more inquiry (mostly local inquiries with local museums and organization so far), but we decided to go with those for now. We do not have much time and volunteers for this for this year. Not everything is on-wiki yet, however we hope to put everything on-wiki soon. Also we prepared a draft of our own timeline of this event. We may skip things like creating a new OTRS queue for WLM because we do not have sufficient eligible and available volunteers to work on this so we will simply use our chapter queue. Also about the website, dot org dot bd domains can only be assigned by BTCL to a locally registered organization. We hope to get the site up upon confirmation of the registration of our chapter that I can only hope to be completed soon. Although we have many problems but WMBD still hopes to arrange the WLM with success. Tanvir Rahman Wikitanvir _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

These is very interesting, Nuno. I am curious about Portuguese monuments in Espanha and Itália :-) Is the registrant official? Say, a reliable source? You could create an international list of Portuguese monuments abroad (maybe Brazil is a special case). Then it could be shared in other languages, regardless if there is any special prize or not. Vicenç

2012/5/10 Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com>om>: monuments in source? (maybe http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_monuments_historiques_des_d%C3%A9par… I'm not getting what this "Portuguese Empire monuments" means... It means that these monuments are under the control of the Portuguese embassy? Are we free to photograph them? In Italy, for Italian monuments (sic), one should ask a permission to take a photo of a monument and release to the public (for instance with a CC-BY-SA). This permission can be granted by local Sovrintendenze (the government). Is the situation for the 4 monuments indicated above in some way different? Cristian _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

Hi WSC, Hi think there definitely will be some 'sensitivities' and I'd be personally very careful with awarding such prize unless all countries involved have an active community that actively support such prize (and of course only for those countries that participate anyway). However, no matter how you do it - somehow you will have to define what is a monument under whatever definition. Making up our own definition is very tricky and not something I'd suggest unless as a last resort. Lets try to focus on the model that we know that works as much as possible and scaling the regular contest to countries - note that even for the UK at this point it is unclear whether it can participate (as I understand the current status) simply because there are no volunteers who are willing to pull the contest off. I much rather see UK, India, USA and Bangladesh participate as individual countries than that we have some extra category about an Empire (with all its sensitivities and PR risks) and not have those countries participate 'for real'. Best, Lodewijk 2012/5/11 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

Hi WSC, First of all: I of course know barely a thing about how this imperialistic contest (for the lack of a better word) would land or how sensitive it would be. What I do understand from my contacts (but those are most likely much less extensive than yours) is that it would most likely be unpopular with our (government) partners in those countries, and indeed not so much with the potential participants. That has significant downsides (we need those partners for the local contest) so it would basically come down to a choice of focus whether we prefer to have national contests or rather an imperialistic one. But in the end I'd like to leave this call to the local teams in question (particularly the India, Bangladesh, Canada and USA (and South Africa?) teams). When it comes to the list: although it sounds easier to organize, asking people to make up their own definition brings in a whole lot of problems of its own. I would like to refer to this essay <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Philosophy>about the reasons why WLM is successful. Reasons include that it is simple (people know what to look for: clear definition) and that their photos will be used on Wikipedia (for that we need the lists as well; and more important, whatever is on that list needs to be there because of a neutral and verifiable definition: usually a government definition). It is perfectly possible to organize a contest with a wider scope, and with a more vague definition, but we would be talking about a different style of contest with different communication requirements. Wiki Loves Monuments is federative in structure (country based) and works from this neutral standard, even though there is a large degree of flexibility how to achieve this standard. This list structure is embedded in the contest concept to a large (although not infinite) degree. It helps us use the tools we use because through these predefined definitions and lists people can identify which of the buildings is on the list through a simple identifier. This makes the upload form more simple, and helps us to re-use the images in articles. It also helps us categorizing on Commons and adding geotags and other metadata when that information is available or becomes available at a later stage. It also reduces the chance that people will photograph un-monumental buildings (their own house) and makes it that way easier to do the judging. Finally I can't mention it often enough that I prefer to have national contests (including the very UK itself!) with all the impact connected to it than an effort to have an extra supracontest - if one would have to choose. But I guess you are yourself the best judge to see if this would be detrimental in any way at all to the WLM-uk. Best regards, Lodewijk 2012/5/17 WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

Hoi Lodewijk, For the international competition I'll wait for input from India. But as long as we bill it as a commonwealth contest and make sure the judges are multinational I would be surprised if it caused offence. As for the database issue, the problem with such a system here in the UK is that we have at least a million images to categorise before we can build it. Otherwise anyone taking an image risks discovering that we have several already. Personally I think for this year I'll just concentrate on the categorisation WSC On 17 May 2012 19:02, Lodewijk &lt;lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org <mailto:lodewijk@effeietsanders.org>> wrote: Hi WSC, First of all: I of course know barely a thing about how this imperialistic contest (for the lack of a better word) would land or how sensitive it would be. What I do understand from my contacts (but those are most likely much less extensive than yours) is that it would most likely be unpopular with our (government) partners in those countries, and indeed not so much with the potential participants. That has significant downsides (we need those partners for the local contest) so it would basically come down to a choice of focus whether we prefer to have national contests or rather an imperialistic one. But in the end I'd like to leave this call to the local teams in question (particularly the India, Bangladesh, Canada and USA (and South Africa?) teams). When it comes to the list: although it sounds easier to organize, asking people to make up their own definition brings in a whole lot of problems of its own. I would like to refer to this essay <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Philosophy>about the reasons why WLM is successful. Reasons include that it is simple (people know what to look for: clear definition) and that their photos will be used on Wikipedia (for that we need the lists as well; and more important, whatever is on that list needs to be there because of a neutral and verifiable definition: usually a government definition). It is perfectly possible to organize a contest with a wider scope, and with a more vague definition, but we would be talking about a different style of contest with different communication requirements. Wiki Loves Monuments is federative in structure (country based) and works from this neutral standard, even though there is a large degree of flexibility how to achieve this standard. This list structure is embedded in the contest concept to a large (although not infinite) degree. It helps us use the tools we use because through these predefined definitions and lists people can identify which of the buildings is on the list through a simple identifier. This makes the upload form more simple, and helps us to re-use the images in articles. It also helps us categorizing on Commons and adding geotags and other metadata when that information is available or becomes available at a later stage. It also reduces the chance that people will photograph un-monumental buildings (their own house) and makes it that way easier to do the judging. Finally I can't mention it often enough that I prefer to have national contests (including the very UK itself!) with all the impact connected to it than an effort to have an extra supracontest - if one would have to choose. But I guess you are yourself the best judge to see if this would be detrimental in any way at all to the WLM-uk. Best regards, Lodewijk 2012/5/17 WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com>> Hi Lodewijk, I can see that there is a risk that a UK funded prize for images of monuments left over from the era of British rule could potentially be controversial. But we are a global movement and we can include people from India and elsewhere in the design and judging - I discussed this at the UK AGM with a British Gujurati and he thought it could be an interesting project. But I'll bcc bounce this by some of our colleagues in India and see what they think. As for needing a database or a list, I'm not sure that is so essential. I'd like to see what happens when we ask people to photograph what they consider to be the monuments of their area. There should be less difficulty launching the scheme, and who knows we may get some overlooked gems. WSC. On 11 May 2012 10:35, Lodewijk &lt;lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org <mailto:lodewijk@effeietsanders.org>> wrote: Hi WSC, Hi think there definitely will be some 'sensitivities' and I'd be personally very careful with awarding such prize unless all countries involved have an active community that actively support such prize (and of course only for those countries that participate anyway). However, no matter how you do it - somehow you will have to define what is a monument under whatever definition. Making up our own definition is very tricky and not something I'd suggest unless as a last resort. Lets try to focus on the model that we know that works as much as possible and scaling the regular contest to countries - note that even for the UK at this point it is unclear whether it can participate (as I understand the current status) simply because there are no volunteers who are willing to pull the contest off. I much rather see UK, India, USA and Bangladesh participate as individual countries than that we have some extra category about an Empire (with all its sensitivities and PR risks) and not have those countries participate 'for real'. Best, Lodewijk 2012/5/11 WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com>> I'm assuming it refers to stuff built in those countries whilst they were part of the Portuguese empire. Much of that will be well out of copyright as the Portuguese Empire peaked centuries ago. I think it would be sensible to do something similar for the British Empire, but with the slight issue that as the Empire covered a quarter of the globe less than seventy years ago there will be some stuff that is still in copyright. I'll ask the UK chapter by cc if they'd be willing to fund a prize for "monumental legacy of the British Empire" - obviously there may be some sensitivities on this so any suggestions as to how not to do this would be appreciated. But potentially this could give a participation route for people in large parts of the world that might not otherwise be covered by WLM. I'm thinking along the lines of: No target database. Anyone may enter. Any image loaded to Commons in Sept 2012 would qualify, provided it is of a building or monument built during the era of British rule in a former part of the British Empire. Entry would be done by adding a hidden category to the article [[:category:WLM 2012 - monumental legacy of the British Empire]] I guess the UK itself should be excluded. WSC On 11 May 2012 09:39, Cristian Consonni &lt;kikkocristian(a)gmail.com <mailto:kikkocristian@gmail.com>> wrote: 2012/5/10 Nicolas VIGNERON &lt;vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com <mailto:vigneron.nicolas@gmail.com>>: <mailto:vriullop@hotmail.com>>: about Portuguese monuments in official? Say, a reliable source? Portuguese monuments abroad (maybe shared in other languages, colonial empire but are 1840 and 1940), some they're no more gouvernement decide to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_monuments_historiques_des_d%C3%A9par… I'm not getting what this "Portuguese Empire monuments" means... It means that these monuments are under the control of the Portuguese embassy? Are we free to photograph them? In Italy, for Italian monuments (sic), one should ask a permission to take a photo of a monument and release to the public (for instance with a CC-BY-SA). This permission can be granted by local Sovrintendenze (the government). Is the situation for the 4 monuments indicated above in some way different? Cristian _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

I'm assuming it refers to stuff built in those countries whilst they were part of the Portuguese empire. Much of that will be well out of copyright as the Portuguese Empire peaked centuries ago.

I'm assuming it refers to stuff built in those countries whilst they were part of the Portuguese empire. Much of that will be well out of copyright as the Portuguese Empire peaked centuries ago. I think it would be sensible to do something similar for the British Empire, but with the slight issue that as the Empire covered a quarter of the globe less than seventy years ago there will be some stuff that is still in copyright. I'll ask the UK chapter by cc if they'd be willing to fund a prize for "monumental legacy of the British Empire" - obviously there may be some sensitivities on this so any suggestions as to how not to do this would be appreciated. But potentially this could give a participation route for people in large parts of the world that might not otherwise be covered by WLM. I'm thinking along the lines of: No target database.

Anyone may enter.

Any image loaded to Commons in Sept 2012 would qualify, provided it is of a building or monument built during the era of British rule in a former part of the British Empire.

I guess the UK itself should be excluded.