Commons talk:Picture of the Year/2006/Future

Various ideas for the next Picture of the Year contest

What did we learn from running this POTY, about how to run future ones?

• Need for very clear instructions on how to make valid votes. Many votes were not counted due to "invalid diffs". Perhaps in future ones, people could actually put their votes on their talk page, and link to that diff, here?
  • Yes, probably. It however worries me that Wikipedia users of >5000 edits don't know how to create a diff. Do we explicitly have to explain what a diff is? -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
• Need to allow administrative time in between preliminary and final
  • Originally the final was to start the second the preselection was finished. Luckily I noticed this on time :) More than 2 days would however have been great. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
• Need some clearly defined roles and people to hold them: announcers/publicisers, vote validity checkers, then vote counters, admins to protect/change MW messages as necessary (need a clear schedule!)
• Better to already have separate archives per day, perhaps, so that voters place their vote directly on the archive page. This preserves the edit history and should make it more transparent if votes are tampered with, also as to who exactly places each vote.
  • Yes, and also per day checking for the diffs etc. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

--pfctdayelise (说什么?) 01:55, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

• Allow users to nominate pictures that were not featured. The voting for featured picture involves a small number of people. I just looked at the archive for May as an example, and hardly any votes involved more than 30 people. Contrast that to the hundreds who participated in the POTY contest. I'm confident that involving more people can help us dig up more good pictures.
  • I have worries that we then will be flooded with pictures "that look cool." I think everybody will nominate his own crappy picture. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
    • Wikimania media contest has always allowed this, and it's never been a problem. --Gmaxwell 17:36, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
• Don't automatically nominate all featured pictures. Many featured pictures didn't get any votes. So why not make inclusion by nomination only. As an example, give each eligible person (or maybe each Commons user who has a certain number of edits -- if that makes it easy to verify) a chance to nominate a number of pictures. For example, maybe give a chance to nominate a total of three pictures, including one of his/her own. Of course, since it's an "of the year" contest, the competition would be limited to pictures uploaded during the year.
  • We initially planned to allow people to add candidates during the voting. We were however concerned about the initial bias this resulted in. If we do this, we certainly need an extra round. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
• Educate people who spend their time at other projects about the goals of Commons. A lot of people commented that they voted for encyclopedic images, hinting that they view Commons from the perspective of one of the Wikipedias. Of course they're welcome to that point of view, but if they have in mind all the other Wikimedia projects that Commons serves, and look at the special purpose of Commons as distinct from the other projects, they might select different candidates.
• Someone suggested having categories such as best work by a Wikimedia editor. A small number of distinct categories of winners can help highlight special groups like these. If we do not have specialized awards, I would advocate not identifying finalists according to whether or not they're Wikimedia contributors, as this invites voters to consider this during voting, and can bias the results. Speaking of not biasing, the random ordering in the gallery was an excellent idea.
  • Concur. Next time however start the randomizing on time. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
• Someone also suggested debating the finalists before the final vote. Once the field has been narrowed to ten (or whatever number future competitions use), a week's debate could prove fruitful. People can voice opinions about the candidates, and voters can take the discussion into account or ignore it, however they see fit, before casting the final vote.
  • Strong support for this. An informed debate helps to make it more than a simple beauty contest.--Eloquence 09:37, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
• Make contacts with more of the projects. This year's competition was well publicized in the English Wikipedia, but although I put an announcement in the Japanese Wikipedia, I didn't see a lot of familiar names among the voters. It's possible that some languages and projects didn't have any notification of the contest. Maybe Meta has a way to reach key people on all projects, and they will help with publicity? (I'm just guessing.)
• There are so many great pictures! Even with ten finalists, I'm having trouble deciding. There are other voting schemes, such as giving each voter a chance to vote for best (four points), second-best (two points), and third-best (one point), with the winner being the picture that gets the most points (to give just one example). Of course I imagine these voting systems can be automated; I hope we don't place extra burdens on the organizers.
• These are suggestions from someone who did not help organize or conduct the competition. You people who did the work deserve to be heard the most. Many thanks to all of you for actually making a wonderful event happen, and for getting so many Wikimedia contributors to participate!

Fg2 07:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

• Start the preparations in December. This way we can start the voting in January.
• A more strict timetable, with predefined roles, etc.
• Already start counting early.
• Voting per category, or only voting for pictures created by a Wikimedian.

...and more, but I can't think of it yet. -- Bryan (talk to me) 09:12, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposed extension for user profiles

This reveals that MediaWiki lacks a safe extension for polls and votes (like those found in other blog sites). For Wikimedia projects, this extension should:

• enforce the format of votes
• allowing simpler automated controls of voters conditions
• use cross-project user identification (the vote will take place directly on the home wiki where user can easily be checked)
• use aggregation of votes collected from those projects.
• possibly require a specific subscription to get an voter identity that can be shared between projects, and stored in local user profiles (so you create a voter account id in that project, and you import it in your local project).
• the voter extension could also store some statistics about a local user profile, such as validating the fact that a user has reached some edit milestones. Those milestones could not be modified directly by the user, but a tool on the local project (which decides with its local rules which conditions are valid to acept the creation of the milestone) would create secure milestones and would import it to the voter's profile when requested. Such import would facilitate the automated control of votes.
• this would be usable for lots of other areas in Wikimedia projects, including decision processes.
• it would give a cross-wiki identity to users, and would allow listing all the wiki projects to which it participates, possibly with different user names.
• it would allow users to link their talk page to the prefered one, other wikis would simply import the common page transparently, without forcing other users to create local accounts; in that case, use signatures would link to the appropriate wiki from which a message is composed.
• globally, this would simplify the communication across projects.
• the cross-project user identity would probably require its own project (other projects will just import a small interface component, in a way similar to the imported Commons images, or cross-project shared contents). Globally, instead of storing pages and articles, this project would store "my votes", "my home page", "my wiki projets" and several categories for the user. It should not need any template, or the templates used there soulf be translated in each local projet.

Verdy p 05:58, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Verdy, you didn't vote in the Board election? :P Remember special:Boardvote? pfctdayelise (说什么?) 06:27, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The user should have at least 200 edits on the commons page. It is not verificable with other projects. In the current scenario, if a user has more than 100 edits on more than one project, (s)he can contest more than once. It would create huge difference in determining the correct and fair contested picture. Shyam ^(T/C) 22:05, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. although for the final we can cross-check users and IPs. And the scenario you suggest would be quite rare, I hope. Hopefully next year SUL will be introduced. Maybe that will make things a bit easier. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 00:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean Stanford University Libraries? Could you explain it how will it make the things easier? Regards, Shyam ^(T/C) 09:56, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Single User Login, ie if you have a Wikimedia account elsewhere, you can use it here, you won't have to register separately. So if we have that, we don't have any reason at all to allow anonymous votes, really. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 10:34, 19 February 2007 (UTC)