On Wednesday 14 August 2019 I talked with Lodewijk about Wiki Loves Monuments. He asked me to avoid saying anything firm about the project before talking to others, and to ask Multichill in particular. What follows are messy notes! Avoid quoting, and assume that there are errors here!
A tenth anniversary is special. A ninth year is also, but people get more excited about the 10th year, which for Wiki Loves Monuments will be in 2020. I took these notes in anticipation of an attempt to write a 10-year anniversary story for Wiki Loves Monuments sometime in the next year to commemorate this milestone anniversary.
What is new with wiki Loves Monuments 2019?
The most important thing is that the project is still ongoing. Its existence demonstrates that a Wikipedia community project can run for years and contribute to Wikipedia community culture. This is the 10th anniversary of the International Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. This year is still business-as-usual. The team is focusing on stability in scaling especially in outreach to newly participating countries. Some new participants are not an easy fit with the original model of the Wiki Loves Monuments outreach system. Every country is different and there is no well defined definition of what makes a monument or a list of monuments. The original outreach and planning system is from Western Europe where there is a culture of defining and listing monuments.
In all of India the are about 6000 monuments. There are about 3000 from the Archaeological Survey of India. For all the state levels we have identified there are about 300 more.
For some former colonies their list of official monumnets was made by a colonial power and no one has updated this list. That means that the colonizer has defined the monuments and no one has yet updated them. These sorts of monument lists might only include monuments to Western colonization and nothing for native culture, which means that practicing the conventional Wiki Loves Monuments process in those places does not achieve celebration of local culture. There is still value in this, because going through the process can identify when a government has not updated its list of monuments, which is often, and when local people are not yet organized to present updated monument lists anywhere to be found.
Wiki Loves Monuments has its origin in Wikipedia Loves Art, which started in February 2009 in New York City. This was around Valentines Day which is how “love” came into the title. This was a collaboration with museums in which the goal was to get more pictures of art in museum. When Lodewijk asked curators at museums in the Netherlands, they advised that the priority should be on quality of representing the artwork and not on the quantity of photos.
Creative Commons Netherlands asked museums in the Netherlands to partner to provide access to museums for photographs.Wikimedia Netherlands organized a banner campaign to ask general Wikipedia readers to visit these museums, take photographs as independent volunteers, then upload them to Wikimedia Commons. This turned out to be a lot of administration and bureaucracy to negotiate visiting relationships with all these museums. The estimate was that to replicate this it would require one staff person for 3 months to organize, which was far out of the budget of the organization. This was Wiki Loves Art and was in June 2009.
When looking for another project the team examined a project of Dutch Wikipedia, not WM Netherlands, which was organizing WikiProject Windmills. Contributors to this project were editing and photographing the 1000 windmills in Netherlands. This project was specifically on Windmills which are historic and in the Netherlands. This project had managed to get good photographs.
The National Heritage Board either newly released or newly published a list of Netherlands National monuments. Martin Dahhmers would know more about this part.
For Wiki Loves Monuments we were looking for a new topic where pictures were needed and where there was a well defined list of items. This was in 2010. is the 10th edition and not 10 years
The first Wiki Loves Monuments campaign was in 2010. Count to notice – there have been 10 Wiki Loves Monument events, but we are only at year nine. September is heritage month in much of the European Union and a time for European Heritage Days. In the Netherlands in particular there is a big event called “Open Heritage Day” in September.
The original campaign was only for the Netherlands. Right away other countries asked to participate. France and some other countries wanted to participate but in advance there was no way to make this scale or present it elsewhere. During the judging of the photos there were even more requests to join.
For 2011 the Council of Europe, Europeana, and Europa Nostra were able to suggest local heritage associations for Wikipedia community members to contact to collaborate. This was the first international Wiki Loves Monuments, but limited to Europe because European chapters had regional relationships among themselves to support each other with administration. Even while we were organizing this people outside of Europe were asking to participate.
From 2012 the program was worldwide and open for any country to participate if they could organize locally.
In 2011 the contest made a world record only with Europe. Guinness World Records confirmed that this was the biggest photo campaign in the world. To do this the WLM team compiled a text file of every photo uploaded with the URL. Along with this they arranged for some independent experts to evaluate the claim. They then submitted the expert reports on a CD Rom and sent this to Guinness. The number of submitted photos was 160,000.
In 2012 the organizers submitted to europe again with the worldwide results, beat the WLM 2011 record, and again got certified as the world’s largest photo campaign. In 2012 the number was 350,000 photos.
There have been some power users which would share up to 10,000 photos at once. These collections might show different weather, like snow, so obviously they were not taken recently. Some people digitized photos from their lifetime and they would include photos digitized from film and the 1970s. In other cases participants would drive around touring monuments and photographing as many as they could as they visited.
The majority of the participants in the campaign are new to Wikipedia with no past contributions or edits. These people upload photos as their first contributions and might only upload 1-2 photos. It is up to the Wikipedia community to reach out to thises people to make them feel welcome and invite them to contribute more and feel the exciet ment of Wikipedia. What is important to realize is that WLM was designed to make it fun and easy for people to participate with a low threshold of preparation or commitment. This makes it easy to scale up.
Axel of Wikimedia Sweden suggested that I interview Alesium of Wikimedia Sweden who is organizing the relationship with the National Library for their participation. For anyone who wants to know what countries are doing, link to the Wikipedia article on the campaign for the general public and to the page on Commons for Wikipedians.
This year in 2019 the focus is keeping things stable. There are a bunch of people in the international team who are busy otherwise and want to run a good campaign without many problems. 30 countries are participating this year in 2019 and last year it was 53. Everyone on the team wants the program to be sustainable for organizers to present locally in their country and for the international team to support. WLM has no staff. Wikimedia Netherlands sponsored the program for some years. Currently Wikimedia Austria sponsors the event. However, a central leadership is not the most critical part of the project. For regional success, there must be local organizers who present the photo competition in their country. After the national competition there is an international round.
The core team coordinates the international competition, they coordinate some of the database work, they coach national teams to onboard them into the program. Probably there a few hundred independent volunteers who contribute to actually organizing the program. No one actually counts the volunteers. Anyone can start organizing and no one assigns volunteers as in wiki style, and anyone can join and start organizing.
There are not many fixed requirements for organizing a national team. If there is a competition and entry into the international competition, then there must be a team of at least 3 judges or a national jury. Other useful infrastructure is a list of monuments and a translation of the landing page and competition details. All of this is flexible, and for example in the Levant, there is one jury which evaluates the contributions of four countries.
Local heritage organizations across the world have been the key relationships for running this competition. It is essential that local teams get teh support they need. Many local teams have support from the Wikimedia Foundation. It is good that there is so much support for Wiki Loves Monuments. It has been shown to be an effective to to get a local Wikimedia community started.
The entire proejct has been a team effort of many people over time. Martin Dahmeers was a champion of the project in the early days, but beyond that, it has always been collaboration among multiple teams in multiple places where the program combines the efforts of multiple cultures and languages.
Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Africa are spin-off projects.