On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Josh Lim <jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com> wrote:

WLM does not use the standard uploading interface, as far as I remember.  Maybe the organizers of the European competitions know something about this, but then again, they're not on this list. :P

But as I said earlier, localization is another matter altogether.  The question now is whether or not localization is a strong guarantor of a project's success.


As a completely random aside, http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/University_of_Canberra/RCC2012 RecentChangesCamp 2012 is going to happen in Canberra, Australia from 20-22 January 2012.  We don't necessarily have the money to fully fund non-Australians to attend, but after we clear our local requests, we can see about providing a small supplement to people outside our region to attend and we could discuss Wiki Loves Monuments there.  (Or if 2 or 3 people committed to attend and quickly, we could ask the Europeans to send some one to Canberra to talk specifically about Wiki Loves Monuments.)

Will Australia do Wiki Loves Monuments?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'd like to see it done, but http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Proposal:Wikipedia_loves_…_my_town is a chapter proposal that I believe passed.  I haven't heard a single thing from local organisers about it since then. It probably will hurt our ability to do stuff in the future with organisations that we promoted this to unless it gets picked up. The people I know who I could really push and push hard to do something similar like Wiki Loves Monuments aren't as interested in monuments.  They are military history people.  We could probably launch something like "Wiki Loves Military History" and get some support from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAAF_Wagga_Heritage_Centre so put on an exhibition of pictures.  Could we duplicate that in Indonesia?  Based on my extremely limited knowledge of the Indonesian military, I don't think you'd be likely to find Indonesians who love their military or the military loving Wikipedians taking pictures.   

Thus, our local situation makes it difficult because I can't drum up the people to do Wiki Loves Monuments that easily, even if most of the work is done just by having a heritage listing, which I was repeatedly reassured it was.  (And no, I some how doubt it is that easy.  After you have the list, you need to then go through and identify all the articles about those heritage listed sites on your own language Wikipedia, then go on Commons and search to see if there is a picture. Then you put that information about the listing, Wikipedia and Cmmons into a spreadsheet, then a list of eligible pictures is created.  At some point, a panel needs to be found to help judge the quality of the pictures submitted on a national level.  (I was reassured this too was easy, and once the ball was rolling, it would be easy to get people on board.  On the other hand, we haven't done anything LIKE THIS with our GLAMs, our membership is tiny and scattered across a huge country… so it doesn't seem that easy.)  You'd also need gallery space and a way to print the pictures.  This takes a fair amount of leg work… and in a country like Australia, no easy, quick and cheap way to get to say Canberra to see your picture on display.  That also puts it off.

I'd like to see it happen in Australia.  I'd support a member who wanted to make it happen.  I've prodded people to see if it will happen.  I just, at this moment in time, can't see it happening unless the Germans or the Dutch or the Spanish turned up at what amounts to our national wiki conference and got some one enthusiastic enough about it to make it their single person mission to make it happen.  (Anti-European bias is another reason I'm having trouble finding people.)