Hi all,
We're a few hours away from kicking off in the first countries! Very exciting of course.
While we're aware that some countries are working hard against the deadline, we have to work with the information available. We noticed that some countries don't have a functional landing page yet, and that means that they are not ready to receive thousands of people on their landing page. We don't want to send all those people there just to get lost.
For the countries where we identify that issue, we will put their competition 'on hold'. That means that the upload campaigns will become active and experienced Wikipedians who know where to go, can start uploading on September 1. However, we will not activate the banners on top of the Wikimedia projects yet. The end of the competition will not be extended because of this and remain the same.
Romaine is in charge of this, and will make the final determination if a banner is ready - on behalf of the international team. We're keeping an overview of the countries that are on hold on the talkpage of the list of participating countries https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2017/Participating_countries#Countries_on_hold . We try to ping the coordinators, but please do check if your country is affected in the next hours.
We encourage everyone to fix these problems as soon as possible, so that we can go live without too much delay. You can find the requirements for the landing pages here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2017/Landing...
Also if you're not affected: if you want to help these countries (if you speak their language), please feel free to help out! That is much appreciated.
Best, Lodewijk (on behalf of the international team)