The WLM team is working on preparing the next edition. After many years of organising the contest, we believe there are still a lot of ways to make the project run even smoother, for everyone − organizers, participants, and of course the Wikimedia Commons community.
We welcome your suggestions regarding WLM.
What specific improvements would you suggest?
What do you love most about WLM that we should keep doing?
(Process wise, I (Jean-Fred (talk)) will monitor this page and summarize the comments to the rest of the WLM team.)
People tend to upload a lot of photos of popular tourist destinations (Golden Gate bridge, Taj Mahal, etc) when there a lot of uncovered monuments. Will be good idea to indicate number of media on subject available already. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:33, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I second this comment. In Spain we have resorted to asking directly for photos of places that are not in Commons. Even of municipalities that are not specifically monuments. Otherwise one can end up thinking that Spain is a mix of Alcázar of Toledo and El Pilar of Saragossa, and not finding a pic about less well known monuments and places. B25es (talk) 18:32, 10 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Organizers should participate more in patrolling of uploads (detecting out of scope, copyrights violation, freedom of panorama issues, categorizing, etc). These tasks should not fall exclusively on Commons maintainers. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:33, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would be helpful to provide a summary of the available marker templates for the individual participating countries and likewise per-country instructions how to identify and research monuments. Many countries or states have quite interesting tools and websites which are known to very few people only. This would also help to find less prominent objects which are not yet covered. --AFBorchert (talk) 14:17, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The monument lists for Ireland currently includes just a very small subset of all objects of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland (where most are protected) and the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (where a considerable subset is protected). As the protection status is hard to verify and bound to change (some objects have actually been removed from the protection to pave the way for construction projects or new roads), it appears best, in my opinion, to take for WLM the full set of objects covered by both databases which, BTW, have been released under {{Cc-by-4.0}} licenses. If there is interest in improving WLM for Ireland, I am interested to help (but not in August/September). --AFBorchert (talk) 14:17, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
For helping in the categorisation of images with geographical coordinates, I dream of a tool that could look at the nearby images (i.e near same location) and propose the categories it has found in these images. Pmau (talk) 07:58, 10 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It would be useful to have an automatic indication of the size (width x height) of each image without needed to do the calculation. Pmau (talk) 07:58, 10 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Colin's comments
There should be a minimum size threshold on images, such as 5 megapixels, to ensure images are capable of being printed at A4 magazine size. In other world photo competitions, the uploaded image may be small but the photographer has to supply a full-size image if they are selected. For Commons, it makes more sense for us to ask for a good resolution up-front. I believe UK had that threshold (or at least, it did the time before).
Encourage participants to upload their best photos of each building, rather than lots of photos of one building. It is really tedious to see 6 photos all similar by same person.
Offer some basic advice on photographing buildings. I think UK had some previously. For example, many photos do not have the camera level so the horizon is wonky. Or the framing is badly judged. Or the camera tilted up.
Make it clear that we are looking for "documentary photography" so extensive Photoshopping will not be permitted (e.g. fake reflections, fake sky, inserted moon). Some digital manipulation is fine.
Have a look at the International judging criteria and jury report. IMO they got the best balance between technical quality and artistic quality and educational quality.
Remind judges, at all levels of the process, that it is not sufficient to select images after only looking at the thumbnail (or small size). At early rounds, it may be OK to look at a full-screen sized image. But for final community rounds and especially for the formal judging, they need to look at the full size image. For some countries, achieving a set of 10 Featured Picture quality images may be difficult, but for others, who had lots of good quality entries, there is no excuse for selecting images with low technical quality or obvious defects.
I think all countries should forward their top 10 to the international jury (I believe some only forwarded the top 3). Sometimes it is hard to choose between the top 10, and so the top 3 is quite arbitrary.
It appeared that many countries did not finish their judging in time to forward to the international jury. We need to either help avoid that or postpone the international judging to allow more time. It isn't fair on some people to loose out on a chance of the international prize.
Last year I was hoping for more integration with Wikidata. It is almost impossible to partecipate to the contest with images of a country that is not yours. Information is generally in the local language only, and you need to have such a deep knowledge of local geography that only a resident can afford. For instance I had several pictures of Paris, but I really gave up because I could not find the buildings in the lists and instructions on how to upload them: the French version of the contest website is a lot different from the Italian one I'm used to. The year before I uploaded some pictures for the Albanian contest, I had to google translate every single page before I could get to the monuments list and the upload links, and after a month several images were cancelled because "no FOP in Albania" (but why those monuments were in the list then? What detail were we supposed to take a picture of?). Very frustrating. For Egypt I totally gave up, I couldn't even find a list. The national contest should be more similar to eachother and grab lists and numbers from wikidata, where you can find a description in multiple languages including a standard English.
Also I noticed that on Oct. 01st there is a kind of blackout of the contest communication until the first days of December when the finalists come out. Its is a lot of time. This is a bit frustrating for uploaders, especially the new ones. I tried to involve friends in the contest, but after the first year they usually give up. The feeling is that after the struggle to apply and donate images for the contest nobody really cares. There should be a few messages after the end of the contest thanking the uploaders and giving some coordinates about the jury's work, selection of finalists and final prizegiving. I agree, like someone said, that in some countries the selection of finalist images is particularly slow and obscure.
I also agree, like User:Colin said, that there should be minimun requirements for the size and the quality of images, and the upload of multiple (ugly) views of the same buildings from the same spot should be discouraged, even if I have no idea how to make this practical. I guess we all agree that last year's achievements of Pakistan and India with last-minute uploads of the poorest quality pictures was quite irritating, a kind of scam, full of duplicates, blurry images, without any information given, just as they come out from the SD card. To me it was quite offending, as I spent so many hours preparing the images to enter. Big uploaders, those in the top list, usually do not have any reward but being in that list. It feels like nobody really cares, and this is sometimes frustrating. In general, Wikimedia could care a bit more of its volunteers, who spend a consistent part of their spare time providing contents to its projects, including Commons and WLM, like inviting them to meetings and Wikimania, or asking for a brief interview to publish in the newsletter. --Sailko (talk) 07:25, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
