Hi all,
I'm very excited to get started on Wiki Loves Monuments 2017! There are some amazing projects in the works.
A few weeks ago, some members of the Wiki Loves Monuments international team met to go over the results from 2016 and start planning for 2017. We've posted notes from the meeting at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_Internationa...
Here are the highlights:
- The international team's draft mission: While there is a lot of excitement around Wiki Loves Monuments, there has also been much discussion about the exact goal. We thought it would be helpful for the international team to get on the same wavelength about our work, and it was a fruitful conversation. Wiki Loves Monuments can serve a few different, very important purposes -- helping people connect to built cultural heritage, providing a significant number of new high quality contributions for Wikimedia, and helping a local group jumpstart their Wikimedia activities. We decided that these three goals should be our mission: to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage, increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects and bolster local Wikimedia communities by leading and facilitating an annual federated, global, low-barrier photo competition. We hope this mission will help us focus and do some valuable work this year.
- Recap of Wiki Loves Monuments: We wrote about some of our work that was necessary to run the campaign in 2016. We did this to make sure all of us in the international team have a clear picture of what needs to be done to organize the competition at the international level. The documentation will hopefully be a helpful resource for future organizers, and help us improve some of the documentation.
- Evaluations for 2016: In addition to the amazing results and statistics from 2016, it's helpful to reflect on feedback that organizers and those who did not organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2016 provided throughout the process. Thank you to everyone who provided replies to us last month. We learned about a few successes (increase in participation, partnerships with UNESCO, and beyond), as well as some opportunities to improve (such as making the process easier, and helping with more partnerships in the future).
- Our projects for 2017: Based on the previous discussions, we'll take on a few tech projects for the next year. We will be working on three: enriching and integrating the monuments data in Wikidata (supporting work from Wikimedia Sweden), enabling more global partnerships and international competition, providing better statistics, and working on a new tool to show off monument data (Monumental).
- What do we think Wiki Loves Monuments will look like in five years? We hope to see the competition continue to grow, for it to be the world's biggest collection of monuments data (in addition to the world's biggest photo competition). We will aim to welcome more countries into the campaign, as well. Of course, these are just a few concepts from the international team, hopefully to start more conversations with everyone who has a part in Wiki Loves Monuments around the world.
We have some exciting ideas in store for 2017! If you have any comments or questions, please do not hesitate to send me an email, reply on this thread, or leave a note on the talk page at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons talk:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_International_Team_meeting_2017
Best, Stephen, on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments international team