Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in Syria

Hi,

Great to see this initiative. As the competition is only a few days away from kicking off, I do have some questions though - I hope you can clarify these things for me. I have trouble finding actual information about the competition in Syria. I note that it is mostly a single person organizing this, so I can understand it is a hard task to do. Maybe even impossible. Most importantly, it seems to me (but I don't speak Arab, so might overlook something?) that the monument lists are still missing. Could you please point me to them, and explain to me what they are based on? Hopefully we can set them up after the example of Jordan, and import them as well into the monuments database so that all the tools work for Syria too.

Secondly, I can find no information about jury and/or prizes - both of course critical components for the competition. Could you enlighten me where you are on that? If need be, others might be able to help to some extent. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:58, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I have unfortunately not heard back yet. Until we can be confident that Syria is hosting a full competition we will have to postpone its participation. This does not mean all is over! Please get in touch as soon as possible, and we can work together to have a decent competition in Syria as well, even if you start a few days later. Effeietsanders (talk) 20:32, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Lodewijk. Unfortunately, there is indeed one person, mainly, who is taking the initiative to bring the competition to Syria (especially due to the current events in the country), and I am just trying to help technically. There were many attempts to get lists of moments from official authorities, but we couldn't get anything at last, and there's no online resources for something like monuments. For the jury, I was thinking about giving it to the same jury of Jordan (the Jordanian photography society, as I noticed on the mailing list of the competition it is possible to help countries with no enough jury members). I know the infrastructure of WLM in Syria doesn't sound very good, but we have made a campaign on the social networks and popular sites to bring participants, and now we have few dozens of photographers ready to participate, so I hope things gonna work well --aad_Dira (talk) 00:13, 1 September 2013 (UTC).

I would love to launch it, but we need to make a few basic things work. Sharing jury members certainly makes sense (although I strongly recommend to include always one or two Wikipedians in the jury for judging whether images are useful for Wikipedia), and would certainly be a solution to that part. For the prizes they can request the notebooks we provide internationally, although maybe considering the circumstances in Syria, prizees like a barnstar might be easier (I am guessing it is hard to send anything by mail in Syria right now?).

It is important to have some sort of monument lists to be able to launch the competition. It doesn't have to be perfect, and we can work together on it too. There are two "easy" approaches I see right now: 1) use the UNESCO world heritage sites. There are six items on the World Heritage List and 12 on the tentative list. That would give a very short list of 18. 2) Use a crowdsourced list like en:List_of_heritage_sites_damaged_during_Syrian_civil_war - you may (or might) have a similar list in Arab?

So the way I see it, the first step would be to make sure there are actually Syrians involved, or otherwise it would be a competition organized by outsiders. I'm pretty sure this might get media attention too. Secondly, he/she/they should make sure of the definition they use: what list. Then, setting up a landing page should be not too hard as the list will no matter what be rather short, and lots of explanation can be copied from Jordan. This all could happen in a few hours if necessary. However, there is most likely a language barrier, so your help in this would be greatly appreciated. Effeietsanders (talk) 10:28, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. It is good that Jordan can help with the jury, maybe the symbolic prizes as well. It is indeed not easy to send something to Syria right now, however, it is still possible. Unfortunately, our heritage sites are few, but with the tentative list we have a number at least. I have just set up a new list for the heritage sites here: ar:ملحق:قائمة مواقع التراث العالمي في سوريا.

We don't have, actually, any such a list for damaged sites of Syria on Arabic Wikipedia. But in any case, I don't think it makes any difference; it isn't official anyway, and if it is just a matter of collecting archaeological sites, it is pretty easy, there is thousands of them in Syria! --aad_Dira (talk) 18:15, 2 September 2013 (UTC).

Thanks for the work so far! I hope you're able to get in touch with Syrian volunteers about this too, to make it a local effort too. Or is it now mostly people from other countries working on this? (If you can share more in private, you can also email me about it, on my username at gmail.com)

One technical note: right now you're working with the Jordanian templates in the list. This might seem like a technicality, but that would bring problems for our database, and might give the impression that you consider Syria as a province of Jordan :) Probably not the intention. Could you copy the templates, and use the copy? Right now the name is something like 'table Jordan landmarks' and it could become something like 'table Syrian landmarks'. Then just replace -jo for -sy etc.

Thanks for your help! Effeietsanders (talk) 09:18, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

No problem in clarifying it here; as I said before, I am just helping, not organizing. It wasn't my idea in the first place, but a local volunteer expressed a high wish of organizing the competition in Syria and started working on several social networks campings, so I offered help in the technical processes and most online matters.

Sorry, I didn't realize at first if there would be a problem in using the template :) all templates are now converted --aad_Dira (talk) 14:14, 3 September 2013 (UTC).

Thanks for converting. Could you add the template names on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52998 ?

For the local volunteers, it might help if you could prod in Arab and ask if they're still interested. Probably helps better than me asking in English. Effeietsanders (talk) 14:27, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

I have added the templates to the report. Regarding the volunteers, it isn't necessary to ask, as I am in a continued contact with them --aad_Dira (talk) 15:12, 3 September 2013 (UTC).

Luckily, we finally got a confirmation that Jordan's jury will be making jury for Syria! Is there anything else needed? Because participants are already asking about why can't they upload pictures and we have missed an entire week of the competition --aad_Dira (talk) 19:06, 8 September 2013 (UTC).

Great to hear! Could you please confirm the landing page? (explaining again what the monuments are, how to find them, how to upload, how the decision will be made and what prizes are involved)? Also, could you please send me an email on my username at gmail.com so that I have your email in case we get enquiries? (Considering the situation of Syria, that would not be very unexpected). Effeietsanders (talk) 09:20, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the notes. I have created a landing page quite similar to that of Jordan. My email is sent --aad_Dira (talk) 23:01, 9 September 2013 (UTC).

upload button

Hi,

I understand everything should be live now. Congratulations :) One request: could you please also add a short textual 'upload image' button above the image in the template? You can find this for example in the Algerian lists, if there's an image, a little '+' button appears - if you click on that, it will upload too. Probably a textual button might work better. Effeietsanders (talk) 22:59, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you :) I have just added the button for both Syria (check) and Jordan (check). If there's anything else, it's always welcomed! --aad_Dira (talk) 07:09, 13 September 2013 (UTC).