Dear everybody,
During the last weeks there have been ongoing discussions within our chapter about Wiki
Loves Public Art and our chapter's active involvement. We have been extremely happy
and proud over what was achieved last year but still we have had to reconsider. Yesterday
the team working on the international contest sadly took the decision that we will
postpone the contest and review the possibility again next year. We have reached this
conclusion as as there are a number of issues that have to be solved for the contest to
make sense, and each of them are a potential show stopper:
The once again ongoing discussions on Wikimedia Commons about PD images and URAA[1] and
also images under Freedom of Panorama in the source country but not in the US[2] – we feel
that it would be irresponsible to use movement resources in this way if the images might
end up being deleted. If the Community isn’t convinced all photos might end up being
deleted even if it is not necessary. We believe that these discussions need to be closer
to a solution before we run this contest again;We lack strong international
partners/sponsors this year which means that the value of these efforts decreases and the
cost would increase. Europeana the other day informed us about their new focus areas for
the year – where WLPA is not prioritized;The technical issues with Maarten Damers’ tools.
As you might know Maarten recently informed the WLM team that he will not work on moving
the tools to Labs, and therefor they might all stop working shortly when the Toolserver is
killed. The Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth team has said that they can take over the work with
them, but this is still not solved as far as we know – and they might not have time to
help with WLPA either. In our team we sadly don’t have the capacity to do this work.
Additionally, there are a few new legal developments in Sweden that we are currently
dealing with. The chapter is currently involved in legal actions regarding publications of
photos of works of art from Sweden, as there are some legal ambiguities in Swedish
legislation. This severely limits what we could have done in Sweden during the contest, as
we do not want to risk contest participants being dragged into the process. Thus meaning
that there will be no national contest in Sweden.
Obviously you can still do a national contest if you so please, but as it seem now,
Wikimedia Sverige will not take on the international coordination this year. I am really
sorry for this as we all have spent time working on this and we have had great fun working
with you all. We sincerely hope that we will be able to pick up the contest again in the
future!
Any data already collected could still be used to generate lists on Wikipedia and we could
help with that if needed. If you do plan to carry on, obviously we are still available for
questions and consultation if needed.
On Commons and other places there have been many discussions on what we could do with
photo contests in the future. This might be worth thinking a bit more about.[3]
Please let us know your thoughts.
Best,
John Andersson, on behalf of the international team
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Use_of_Foreign_Works_Restored_und…
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/Non-US_Free…
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013/Future