New subject: Fwd: [Internal-l] Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - Europe?

15 Dec 2010

Forwarding with permission of the sender. I'm very eager to see the UK and Ireland
participate in this if possible, but from my experience of running Britain Loves Wikipedia
I'm very aware that this needs a team of people running it rather than just one
person. So: is anyone interested in leading/helping with this project?

Thanks,
Mike

Begin forwarded message:

...
  From: Lodewijk &lt;lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org&gt;
 Date: 14 December 2010 20:20:15 GMT
 To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)"
&lt;internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
 Subject: [Internal-l] Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - Europe?
 Reply-To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination \(closed
subscription\)" &lt;internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;

 Summary of this email (sorry for long text): We did Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) 2010 in
the Netherlands, we would like to do Wiki Loves Monuments again in 2011, but now in
Europe. This is only possible when many chapters participate, therefore this e-mail. To be
clear: this event will only happen on a European level if there is sufficient chapter
participation to combine efforts. Please feel free to forward to whomever you find
appropriate.

 You might have heard before about Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 in the Netherlands. It was a
highly successful photo scavenger hunt with 12.500 submissions and over 250
participants[0]. We recently completed a post mortem of this event with a more extensive
description and analysis [1]. However, there are still many monuments in the Netherlands
which can be photographed, so we are considering another run for next year - but then in a
European context. Below we will explain a bit how we got where we are, what we have in
mind, and what you could expect. 

 So how did this all start? At the Dutch Wikipedia we have the windmill project. One of
the main goals was to get an article with an image for every windmill in the Netherlands.
Lists were created of windmills per province and statistics were made on a regular basis
to track progress. This approach worked very well and made it possible to tackle a big
problem; All the windmills have an article now.

 Some volunteers, in cooperation with the chapter, managed to get a dataset of all
"Rijksmonumenten" (Dutch national monuments - 60.000 buildings/objects with some
historical or cultural relevance) from the "Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel
Erfgoed" (Dutch national heritage organisation, RCE). This marked the birth of the
"Rijksmonumenten" project. The project uses the lessons learned in the windmill
project. The data from the RCE was converted into lists by location and put on the Dutch
Wikipedia. The community started improving the lists by adding missing information or
adding photo's. 

 In June 2009 Wikimedia Nederland ran Wiki Loves Art /NL [2] : A photo scavenger hunt in
more than 40 museums. Also quite successful (5.400 photos), but much more work intensive
because you need to keep contacts with all the museums and usually museums are further
away from people's homes than the nearest monuments. 

 For 2010 we were looking for a nice topic for a photo competition. The
"Rijksmonumenten" project was running very well so we decided to organize Wiki
Loves Monuments to give this Wikipedia project a boost.

 So, what would a European WLM most likely look like? Let me give you an idea of what we
are thinking of, changes are open for debate of course. Trying to incorporate the main
lessons from last year in the Netherlands into a European model, we think it might work
best if Wiki Loves Monuments is organized on a national level primarily, but with
cooperations, shared resources and international prizes on a European level. The national
contests do not have to be identical, but some consistency would be practical. We are not
sure yet what countries would be most successful, but our initial hope would be EU chapter
countries and Switzerland. 

 Basically, Wiki Loves Monuments would run 1-30 September 2011, and participants would be
allowed to submit photos of monuments which are part of the object list. This object list
includes the address and ideally geo-coordinates of all monuments which are allowed to
participate. In each participating country there would be some prizes available, to be
awarded by a jury for that country. The top-X of each could be competing for European
prizes. 

 You can find more information on how WLM 2010 was organized on the post-mortem [1]. That
also lines out in more detail how much work it would be, and what the positive impact
could be. 

 Most of the local work would be to get a database with the objects, create object lists
from that (possibly Dutch volunteers could support you with that, they have the experience
[3]) and get the community involved on that. You would need to get communications going,
both external to the press (press releases etc) as to participants (have a clear website
in your language(s) with explanation, rules etc), find a jury and prizes for them to
award. We can help each other with example press releases, best practices, template and
list examples and community motivation. 

 So, what to do when you like this idea? Well, it would be good to first of all check with
your collegues (at the board, other members, community) what they think of it. You
probably need several people to run such a competition over time to some extent. Next step
would be to do some analysis on your local situation: who would be good partners (who
keeps the lists of monuments?) for you, how many monuments are there in your country, are
they well spread? What information/photos are already available of it roughly? Are there
community members involved in that kind of topic? Definitely read the post-mortem and some
relevant links from there [1]. 

 For the time being, we registered www.wikilovesmonuments.eu and are in touch with CARARE
and Europeana (European cultural heritage organizations) - who seem to be interested in
laying contacts with local cultural heritage organizations. Hopefully that helps them to
realize the European context and impact this could have. The most important partner in
each country would be the one that governs the database with all monuments, and could
release that to you. This database/list is crucial for the success of such an event. 

 Please inform us (ideally through internal-l) when you would be interested in joining in
such European event, if there is enough enthusiasm, we will create a special (easy to
join) mailing list to coordinate efforts to allow more volunteers to join in the
discussions. We already took the liberty of discussing this with some other chapters, and
are hopeful that it will actually get to a first grand chapter cooperation program. Of
course this does not mean you are bound, but that you think you would like to participate.
You can also join #wikilovesmonuments on freenode irc of course if you like. 

 With kind regards,

 Maarten Dammers
 Lodewijk Gelauff

 [0]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments
 [1]: 
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/post_mortem
 [2]:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Art_Netherlands
 [3]: 
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/template_sys…

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