[Wikimedia-in-en] Supporting photothons

[Ashwin Baindur]

Hello friends,

Its great to participate in a photothon - it generates lots of outreach,
many images, new recruits to Wikimedia projects and of course lots of fun.
Wish you were there in Kolkata or Ahmedabad but couldn't make it? There are
ways to be part of the event though one may not be physically present.

Before the event, you can help by evangelising, drumming up participants,
setting up the pages, image categories for upload etc. Had experience of a
photothon before? Do consider advising the organisers of the next one. Far
too often, the organisers are arranging a photothon for the first time
without previous experience.

But equally important, is post-event support. Once the event is over and a
few hundred images are uploaded to Commons, the event organisers and
participants are tired and psychologically the event is over for them.
However, the value of their effort is at a halfway point in the journey and
not yet delivered. Often the images are not in place where they need to be
- in the articles of the objects/places they show.

Here is where we come in. A number of actions still need to be done. We can
help these images attain value in the Wikimedia projects.
* Check the licensing of the images.
* Categorise the images appropriately.
* Do improve the captions. Adding multi-lingual captions is a fantastic
service to your language wikipedias.
* Search out the relevant article on English Wikipedia and add the images
to them. Of course if the article already is illustrated, there is no
compulsion to add more images, only ensure that the best ones from the past
and new images illustrate the article.
* Add the images to the relevant articles in your Indic language Wikipedia
of interest.
* Create stubs for the important localities of your cities which either
dont exist or are red-linked.
* Ensure that the articles in Indic languages have interwiki link to the
English one.

This is a really great task, left incomplete far too often. So please help
out folks. If each Indian editor just added one image or did a handful of
categorisations or pitched in some way, the tasks will get done in no time
at all.

Obviously it is naturally right for the English Wikipedia SIG to help such
photothons. We felt that the best way to help the photothon is to create a
list of articles on English Wikipedia pertaining to the city/region of the
photothon. This would not only the existing articles but also those which
have not been created. This has been done for the Ahmedabad photothon.

How to create such a list? Three ways:
* Go to the city Wikipedia article/related articles and make links of every
geographical feature/monument/locality pertaining to the city listed in the
Wikipedia article.
* Go to a few travel web-sites and make a list of all of every geographical
feature/monument/locality pertaining to the city listed in the web-site.
* Go to Google books, find some good travel, geography or history books
and make a list of all of every geographical feature/monument/locality
pertaining to the city listed in them.

Best of all, use all three methods to create  the list.

Here is an example created to help the Ahmedabad photothon gang who have
added 768 images to date.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Ahmedabad

Do add additional topics to the article list, add images to them,
reorganise the links if you wish & create articles from the red links.

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
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