Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments/2023 International Team meeting report

Overview

Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WLM_international_2023meeting The Wiki Loves Monuments international team met in person in May 2023, in Vienna, Austria. The meeting was organized with support from Wikimedia Austria. Several other stakeholders also participated in the meeting, along with the members of the international team.

Attendees

In-person

1. Lucy: WLM team member
2. Erina: WLM team member
3. Alicia: WMSE, working on WLM database migration to Wikidata
4. Krishna Chaitanya: WLM team member
5. Manfred: WMAT, provides staff support to the WLM team
6. Ruben: WLM team member
7. Éder: WM-Brazil; developer
8. Ciell: WLM team member
9. Jean-Fred: developed the monuments database, was on the WLM team
10. Beppo: organizer of WLM in Austria
11. Claudia: WMAT director
12. Dimitar: facilitator

Online

1. Mesha: DEI researcher on WLM
2. Lodewijk: WLM team member
3. Stephen: WLM team member

Day 1

History and Intent of WLM

After introductions and a brief discussion of the history of WLM and the international team, one of the initial aspects that was discussed was the intent of WLM. The goal was for everyone to get a common understanding of why WLM is being organized. The common points that emerged include:

1. Documentation of cultural heritage: This can be thought of in two ways - documentation of cultural heritage that has never been documented (for example, a monument having no image on Wikimedia Commons) and other being, monuments that already have good coverage on Wikimedia Commons, but still get huge coverage year after year. For the latter, it is important because there are seasonal effects on monuments, such as weathering which are important for documentation. It is also important to acknowledge the fact that monuments are not permanent, there were many examples in recent years where natural calamities or accidents (such as fires) have destroyed many monuments.
2. Participants: The campaign has been successful in bringing newcomers into the Wikimedia movement with a very lightweight contribution model. On average, more than 50% of the participants are newcomers.
3. Organizers and communities: As WLM is organized in a federated model, it has been effective in fostering local communities organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in their respective countries. Several members of the group also mentioned that WLM had been one of the first outreach activities they organized.
4. There was also a mention that participating in WLM helped to change the perspective of what is to be identified as a monument, and by whom.

Future of WLM

The definition of a monument

With every iteration of the campaign, more often than not, the international team had been faced with the question of “What is a monument?” - the definitions and perspectives are often varied, and are dependent on the local context. There were concerns raised around the word “monument” being mildly imposing and how it may not translate well into all languages. While it is fine to broaden the scope to include various perspectives, we need to be careful not to significantly overlap with other campaigns such as Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Africa. One of the reasons why WLM has been easy to participate in has been because of a very clear and specific call to action, and broadening it widely might confuse participants, especially newcomers.

Resources for organizers

Similar to the onboarding guide for participants, several team members felt that the international team should focus and invest in documentation and guides for organizers. Although there is extensive documentation on Wikimedia Commons, parts of it were outdated and not very accessible for new organizers.

ACTION ITEM

The international team is to invest resources in creating accessible resources for national organizers of WLM. Whether this will be documentation, a guide, or a tutorial, the form is yet to be decided.

DEI research

During 2022, the international team has facilitated DEI research through an external researcher to understand the pain points related to the campaign (specifically the organizers) and make the campaign more inclusive.

Some of the points that were discussed in the research include:

1. Built heritage lists don’t allow the participation of indigenous communities, where the communities consider them as monuments, but not really at the global level.
2. There were some cases where the local indigenous communities didn’t want their heritage to be photographed, which led to some tension between the organizers and the communities.
3. The research suggests that, rather than only focusing attention on the monument, we could also try to communicate that the context around the monument is important and eligible for participation in the campaign. For example, the events around the monument that the local community celebrates. The 2017 winner is a great example of that.
4. In some regions, women face difficulty documenting monuments outside the city. We also need to be more inclusive and proactive when including the LGBT community.
5. People are having problems accessing information in their language, which prevents engagement. Although more translations would be beneficial, translations alone are not enough to address the different needs of communities.

Some of the ideas that emerged from the discussion were:

1. Facilitate more connections within WLM teams, for example, pairing a new team with an established team, and organizing collaborative knowledge-sharing sessions.
2. Identify and communicate more ways in which people can contribute to WLM. Although they may not be directly related to the core campaign (such as adding the metadata), they can still be provided as adjacent opportunities for the national organizers to engage communities.
3. The international winners could be provided with a travel budget to encourage them to visit and document underrepresented heritage in their respective countries.
4. Analyze the online user journey of people participating in Wiki Loves Monuments (this can vary by country). In Brazil, it is six clicks from the banner to upload a file.
5. Understand how people are participating: desktop vs. mobile (app vs. non-app). This will help us understand if there is a need to cater to the needs of users of a specific platform.
6. Explore pathways to create more sustainable technical infrastructure. Purely depending on one volunteer or even two is risky, as there is a huge chance they might be inactive or no longer interested beyond a certain point. Parts of the infrastructure can be owned by interested affiliates, such as WMB.
7. The international team should work on designing one or two very effective landing pages and provide a resource to national organizers. These designs should be maintained, and if needed, improved with each year.

Wikidata Contests in the Context of WLM

WMAT presented an overview of the Wikidata competitions they held around International Museum Day in 2021 and 2022. The contributions were tracked through the Programs & Events Dashboard. It was proposed to hold a Wikidata competition in the context of and parallel to WLM organized by WMAT. WMAT is also willing to award prizes at the international level, however, the campaign can be organized in a federated model as in the previous editions and similar to the main WLM campaign, by whichever countries are interested. It also allows people to participate in the multiple country Wikidata campaigns, as they can improve data of monuments irrespective of their country.

ACTION ITEM

Further discussion of the team if this is seen as a good addition. If so, the WLM team to coordinate with WMAT when launching communications for WLM 2023 to let the national organizers know about this potential opportunity and connect them with WMAT as needed.

Multi-Year Strategy

Participants discussed what the international team will be focusing on during the next three years or so, and how that will help to evolve the campaign. The three key areas discussed were participation in the campaign (at the national organizing level), the format of the campaign itself, and technical infrastructure. Engagement of National Campaigns National campaigns organized for WLM could broadly be divided into three groups:

1. Established campaigns: These are campaigns/groups that are well established, usually backed by a strong affiliate in the region. These teams require little to no support from the international team, to run their campaigns. More often than not, they may also be able to and willing to mentor new teams or countries.
2. Irregular / moderately established: These are the campaigns/groups that have probably organized a WLM campaign a few times but are not either consistent every year or face challenges in doing so and just keep the campaign going at the bare minimum.
3. New campaigns/teams: These may be campaigns in countries that have never participated in WLM or countries that had a previous iteration of WLM a while ago, and there is a completely new team taking it up now.

It would be helpful if the international team could map out what the pathway from a new team to an established campaign looks like. While this may not work or be possible for every country, it will still be worthwhile to map out the ideal case, and what resources and mentorship support it takes. It will help to better direct the efforts and the resources to teams that need them the most. We could also have more quantitative goals for each of these levels, and we can think of how we can move teams possibly up the ladder. Campaign Format WLM is organized in a federated model, where the international sets a broad framework to work within along with running the international jury rounds and coordination. The campaign at the ground level is organized by national teams for their respective countries. The national teams plan and organize according to what works best for their country.

During the past few years, the international team had requests from organizers to organize campaigns that are not at the country level, which is a shift from the model that currently exists. The team discussed whether this model works or whether we should be thinking of a new model. It was mostly agreed that the country model should be continued as it is, however, we should have a policy/process to consider requests that are not at the national level, and also the possibility of organizing a Rest of the World campaign.

ACTION ITEM

Develop a policy to consider requests from organizers are would like to organize a campaign that is not a country-level

ACTION ITEM

Develop a model for a rest of the world campaign i.e. participants having images related to countries which aren’t participating in WLM can still participate. Erina offered to do some first research on the possibilities of this new addition.

Governance

The team discussed how decision-making within the team should be handled, for both financial and non-financial related aspects. Going forward, as the WLM grant will be integrated into that of WMAT's next multi-year grant starting Q1 2025, the points also include related financial aspects:

• Ciell and KC will be the two contact persons for WMAT with Lucy being the observer, and support in case the primary contacts are not available.

Financial

1. If an expense is in line with the planned budget and within EUR 100, WMAT staff can directly make the expense and let the team know.
2. For up to EUR 1000, a single email from one of the two contact persons and an agreement by another team member (not necessarily the contact person) will suffice.
3. For larger expenses, the decision has to be confirmed by at least two members of the contract.
4. When an expense is made, it should be documented using a specific WLM-finance mailing list, which allows us to track all expenses ever made.

Oversight

WMAT maintains an ongoing expenses sheet, which shows the budget spent and the budget remaining for each budget line at any given point. At least once every quarter, at least one of the contact persons should review budgets and ongoing finances with WMAT staff, and make changes as necessary.

Non-Financial Decisions

Minor decisions can be made during the meetings or over email. Usually, if there are concerns raised, it can be interpreted by any core team member that it can be moved forward. Major decisions are to be proposed by email, and all team members get one vote, within a response time of 48 hours. The decision can proceed if there is a majority. If there is a tie, the decision should be considered not approved. From time to time, depending on the need, the team can also delegate a mix of WMAT staff and WLM-i team to handle all decisions related to a certain aspect, within an approved budget. For example, organizing the team meeting and prize distribution to winners.

ACTION ITEM

WMAT: Set up a mailing list for expense tracking

ACTION ITEM

WMAT to draft an agreement mentioning the required process, which should also cover aspects related to the integration of the WLM grant in the future, including an exit clause.

Day 2

Montage

Montage is a tool that supports various jury formats for photography campaigns based on Wikimedia Commons. Although it was originally developed by WLM, it is also now used by several other Wiki Loves campaigns across the movement. The back end of the tool was developed by Stephen and Mahmoud, and the front end by Pawel.

Due to increased usage of the tool during recent years, there were feature requests that needed to be implemented on the front end, and the front-end framework to be updated from Angular to Vue.js. Internationalization (i18n) should also be part of the planned front-end work.

Ciell and KC have spoken to two front-end developers during the Wikimedia Hackathon, who are available to work from September.

ACTION ITEM

Ciell to follow up with the developer(s) and necessary next steps involved with getting them on board.

Monumental

Monumental works with information from Wikidata and allows participants to search and select monuments on a map, which can then be used to directly upload images to Wikimedia Commons with pre-filled data. There is no active development of the tool and the original developer is not active anymore. Similar to Monumental, Wiki Movement Brazil has successfully built a tool (https://wikilovesbrasil.toolforge.org/) and Italy is planning to do something similar. Czechia also did something similar (https://map-of-monuments.toolforge.org/). With Monumental, the framework used is too deprecated and no one who is on the team currently has knowledge about the challenges, which makes it almost impossible to improve the tool. As there are several other active efforts to build something similar, it would be best for the international team to officially retire Monumental and coordinate efforts across all the entities for the benefit of WLM.

ACTION ITEM

KC to coordinate with the current users of monumental, WMB, WMIT and WMCZ to plan to retire monumental and next steps to join forces for a new map-based tool for WLM.

Central Notices & Upload Campaigns

CentralNotices is one of the primary ways to create awareness about the campaign, especially among new users. The international team manages the setup of the banner campaigns for all participating countries. Although the CentralNotice feature was originally designed to support fundraising for the Wikimedia movement, which is still its primary use case, WLM has been one of the first community uses of it. However, during the past few years as the number of campaigns and events increased significantly across the movement, the CentralNotice space has become increasingly cluttered.

Historically, WLM banners didn’t have any campaign diet, a configuration that limits the number of times a banner is shown to a user based on certain parameters. Since 2021 and later, there have been several volunteer admins to impose a diet to make space for other campaigns and also avoid banner fatigue for the users.

One of the reasons not having a campaign diet works is because it helps users (especially newcomers) to find the campaign pages again if they want to upload an image. This might hinder newcomers from successfully participating in the campaign even though they are aware of it. Currently, there is no clear consensus or a solution on how this can be handled.

One of the possibilities could be the adoption of the Event Registration tool that is being developed by the WMF Campaigns Product team. The system allows users to register for an event or a campaign after they first see it, which allows organizers to follow up with the registered users to provide the necessary support. This may not be ready until 2024 to meet the needs of WLM.

Another idea that came up was to have two banners, one banner with a diet for experienced users and the other one for newcomers (unregistered users) with no campaign diet. Along with the banners, there were suggestions to add communication on the landing pages to encourage participants to bookmark the pages and also enable translations for the Wiki Loves Monuments website.

ACTION ITEMS

• Test banner campaigns separately for registered and unregistered users with and without diet respectively.
• Develop communications to encourage participants to bookmark landing pages for later reference

Wikidata

Ideally, all monument data should be on Wikidata. There have been several efforts in different countries and by national WLM teams to migrate their respective country’s monuments lists to Wikidata, however, there is no coordinated effort across countries or clear guidance for new countries on the process.

Some of the projects and links related to this include:

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_WLM

• Wikidata:WikiProject_WLM/Status (maybe outdated)

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2186
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Built_heritage
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Content_Partnerships_Hub

• led by Wikimedia Sweden

The key takeaways from the discussion are:

1. We don’t have a clear overview of the availability of monuments (the process and the efforts) in Wikidata at the moment.
2. Rather than trying to convince everyone to move everyone to Wikidata, we should first direct our efforts to communities that are already interested.
3. The WLM-i team needs a Wikidata volunteer to act as a bridge between Wikidata and the organizing teams.

Monuments Database

The monuments database predates Wikidata. The Erfgoedbot works between the database and Wikipedia lists. The database is also easy to query and can be localized. However, adding datasets can be done by a few people only, mostly Jean-Fred or Andre Costa.

Surveys

The WLM-i has conducted two different surveys in the past, the participants survey and the organizers survey. The participants’ survey was sent to all users who uploaded at least one image, asking about their experience of participating in the campaign. The organizers’ survey was sent to national teams, asking about their experience of organizing a WLM campaign in their respective countries.

Although these surveys have been useful, they haven’t been sustainable to run every year, or even if they are run every year, to be able to spend enough time to make good use of the data. Some of the options proposed include conducting the participants' survey every three years instead of yearly and letting national teams interpret the data rather than the international team.

ACTION ITEM

KC to start a discussion on what can be done about surveys and evaluation to make it more sustainable and also get useful information to improve the campaign.

2023 team roles

Area of work	People
National organizers outreach and coordinate	Mesha and Manfred
Social Media	Lucy
Design of Country+ model	Erina
Project management includes: finances grant writing report writing	Ciell and KC
Jury coordination	Ruben (+ suggested back-up)
Award coordination	Manfred
Surveys and analysis	KC
Banners, templates, upload wizards	Romaine, with Ciell for support and documentation
Technical coordination support	Partnership with WMB by Eder
Wikidata migration	Eder to support Erina
Technical infrastructure	to be hired (Stephen and Mahmoud to support as required)

Conclusion

Overall the in-person meeting has been successful in achieving its goals. All the team members were able to get a good understanding of different areas of the campaign organizing, build relationships, and think together about some of the long-standing problems and potential solutions. It was also effective in bringing together different stakeholders who have been actively working in different areas of WLM, such as WMSE and WMB. It has also been effective in having conversations with the fiscal sponsor and exploring opportunities for further integration of WLM in WMAT’s plan.