Hi everyone,
I wanted to let you know about some experimental outreach we have planned for today's solar eclipse, which will be partially visible from parts of the Americas, as well as spots in Asia, Africa, and Western Europe.
We put together a blog post https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/08/18/solar-eclipse/ [1] and infographic https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_2017_solar_eclipse_-_upload_to_Commons_infographic.png [2] to encourage photographers of the upcoming solar eclipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_2017 [3] to upload them to Commons. This request was placed on the Village Pump [4] last week.
We're planning to publicize the blog post on our social media channels today, and the only *specific* outreach we have planned is to encourage people who post high-quality photos on those platforms to upload them to Commons. We're deliberately limiting our push so we don't flood Commons with poor-quality photos, and/or make life difficult for anyone.
Please feel free to use the infographic [2] to reach out to photographers, and let us know if you have any comments or concerns with anything. We'd love to work with you all on improvements as needed. This is definitely an experiment, and your feedback will help us figure out if we'll want to repeat it for other (perhaps more global) events. [5] We are also going to collect some basic metrics and will send them out once we assess today's experiment. Thank you!
Mel
[1] Featuring an interview with Wikimedia Commons user: Juliancolton, the post details how to take eclipse photos and how to upload them to Commons https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/08/18/solar-eclipse/
[2] English: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_2017_solar_eclipse_-_upload_t... Spanish: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_2017_solar_eclipse_-_upload_t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_2017
[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Eclipse_photography
[5] If this works, we would love to help make templates or encourage photographers to upload in the future. Please let us know what events might work with this approach.