2025-08-09 –, MERU (🗣️ ar, es, fr, sw)
Language: English
🎥 Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/IIJaOtycCf0?feature=shared&t=24432 🎥
Wikimedia Ukraine has been organising Wiki Loves photo contests for over 10 years. Our goal is to keep participants interested and involved, and maintain a good balance between retaining veteran Wiki Loves contributors and keep the contest relevant and accessible for newcomers.
We will discuss different approaches that worked in Ukraine, share ideas on how to improve different areas of Wiki Loves contests, and also hear the ideas and experiences from the audience. We want to discuss a number of problems and solutions to them, such as: building a monuments database, biases in heritage lists, getting more diverse photos, community building, attracting new participants, increasing use of images, evaluating large numbers of upload, and others.
This session will be beneficial for current or prospective organisers of Wiki Loves photo competitions all over the world.
Wikimedia Ukraine has been organising Wiki Loves photo contests for over 10 years, starting with our first Wiki Loves Monuments contest in 2012. Over these years we implemented multiple changes to keep participants interested and involved. From community prospective, our contests have a twofold target audience:
* We now a community of veteran Wiki Loves contributors who deeply care about the contest. They are an important stakeholder in our contest organisation, we regularly survey them and stay in touch with them via talk pages and social media to get their input.
* We also want to keep the contest relevant and accessible for newbies is important. We need to keep the participation barrier relatively low and encourage participation from both professional photographers who want to share some of their collection, and from heritage enthusiasts who want to travel and take pictures.
We will discuss mainly based on successes of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine (Ukraine is almost every year among the top countries in terms of the number of upload) with some additional examples.
The problems we want to discuss (and solutions to them!) include:
* No public database of monuments
* Too difficult to win the big prize
* People always upload pictures of the same beautiful and famous monuments
* List are biased (e.g. colonial / ethnic bias)
* Community building
* Attracting new participants
* Keeping volunteers involved
* Images not used on Wikipedia
* No freedom of panorama
* Evaluating large numbers of upload
Among ideas we experimented are: regional and special thematic photo competition categories (like [https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2810696 Jewish heritage] or [https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5056910 Elements of exterior]), separate categories for the highest number of monuments pictured, awards for previously undocumented monuments, to most prolific newbies etc.
Aims and objectives: participants learning how to improve Wiki Loves competitions in their countries or communities, have the contest relevant even to people taking part for years, while creating space for newbies, and motivating them to join next year.
This workshop is based on and includes feedback from the [[:m:Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024/Submissions/How to keep Wiki Loves participants interested even after 10+ editions|one we have organised at the CEE Meeting 2024 in Istanbul]]. We believe it will be especially useful for the Global South communities.
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
-
Campaigns, Capacity building, Collaboration
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
-
Some experience will be needed
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
-
Onsite in Nairobi
- Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
-
I agree
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
-
The main focus of this session is maximising impact of Wiki Loves campaigns worldwide in terms of number of participants, uploads, use of photos, number of objects pictured and other metrics.
We also pay significant attention to inclusivity by discussing how to keep participants' communities diverse and accessible to different experiences.
Finally, we also address making Wiki Loves campaigns sustainably successful by retaining participants, increasing diversity and fighting biases.
Mykola Kozlenko (User:NickK) is a member of Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organising team since 2012. He is the Vice-Chair of Board of Wikimedia Ukraine, an administrator of Ukrainian Wikipedia and an active contributor on Commons with 50K+ edits.
Antanana (Nataliia Tymkiv) is a Ukrainian Wikipedia editor and administrator, member of Wikimedia Ukraine. She has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees since 2016, chairing it since 2021. She was a part of the Wiki Loves Earth international team, and organised Wikimedia CEE Meetings in 2014 and 2018 in Ukraine. Since 2013 she has been a member of Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organising team. From 2012 to 2016 served as a Board member of Wikimedia Ukraine, and as its volunteer Executive Director (2013-2015). An experienced editing workshop organiser, VRT agent