Commons talk:Wiki Loves Monuments 2017/banners/en

Some comments about the current page

@Atsirlin: Thanks for putting this page together. It looks good. It would be good to make it clear that this is an experimental project run as part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017. It's also good to say a bit more about the organizers. Feel free to include this information in however way works for you. Below is one suggestion:

I recommend starting the page with something along these lines: "Every year, tens of thousands of monuments photos are uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Monuments contest. We, a group of volunteers in Wiki Loves Monuments Russia, are interested to increase the usage of such photos across Wikimedia projects. More specifically, we see an opportunity for such photos to be used in Wikivoyage. Therefore, we have designed an experimental contest as part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 to encourage the uploading and usage of monuments photos. If you are interested to participate, please read on."

Let me know if this works. :) --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 10:34, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Template for banners contest

@Romaine: WLM-RU folks are experimenting with encouraging panoramic contributions on top of Wiki Loves Monuments usual uploads (See internal thread/email with Alexander in it for more context). I'm wondering: does it make sense to create a separate upload campaign for these banner contributions? This way, a relevant Wiki Loves Monuments template can be added. At the moment, the upload link for the banners contest will add a category only. Please let us know your thoughts and if you can help. --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 10:47, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi LilyOfTheWest, Wiki Loves Monuments is organised in such way that people upload images first to a local contest, and the winning images of the local contest participate in the international contest. The first question that needs to be answered is if these panoramic images do participate in the local and international contests? If yes: I would suggest them to be uploaded in the local contests and the banner category added. If no: how is it then Wiki Loves Monuments?

Don't understand be wrong: it would be great to have more panoramic images. But we need to think about how they are part of WLM (or not). Romaine (talk) 10:23, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Good point, Romaine. There is only one jury process for the banners contest, no separate national and international. Here is how it works: the user uploads their photo as part of WLM. This photo is uploaded as part of a national competition and will follow the usual WLM process (national jury first, and then if accepted as top 10 it goes to the international jury). The uploader of the photo has a chance to crop the photo and upload this new photo as part of the banners competition. This will be a new upload and the questions is: should it have a template or not, and if yes, how will the template look like, and once we figure that out: can we implement it? I want to be mindful of your time as well, since we are less than a week away from the start of the contest. I have a sense that just figuring out the correct design of the template can take time, and I'm leaning towards saying that let's not create a template. Let's handle it as an experimental case for this year's contest, review the results at the end of fall, and decide how we want to proceed for next year which should be a conversation with the organizers of the banners competition and the international team. What do you think, Romaine?

[@Atsirlin: please correct me if I'm wrong in my description above.]

--LilyOfTheWest (talk) 14:34, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Romaine, as Lily said, there will be a separate jury process, so banners don't have to go through the same procedure as regular WLM submissions. To my understanding, WLM is open for all submissions that have free license and depict cultural heritage. The page banners fulfill both requirements, so they fall in the scope of WLM.

Lily, yes, that's correct, and yes, we can easily live without the template. --Alexander (talk) 21:22, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

@LilyOfTheWest: This subjects puzzles me for some days now. I do not what do do with it. In generally I would recommend that the contest template is only used, as that one is maintained and translated in many languages. The only criteria with this template is that it is added to a file that is in the contest and uploaded during the month September. So indeed, I would not suggest creating a template, but have a banner category instead. Romaine (talk) 13:58, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

@Romaine: thanks for thinking about it and looking into it. Given that it's not required by the organizers, we can most probably safely live without a separate template. We will do some double-counting of some of the photos that are uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Monuments, but we can always get the number of double-counts (if it's even fair to think of them as double-counts:) by looking at the number of photos in banners' category if needed. @Effeietsanders: FYI.

@Atsirlin: let's go with the category solution only then.

Thanks! --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 15:22, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Just to make sure I understand it all... Are you allowed to submit a banner that is based on an existing photo, or should it be your own submitted photo? If the latter, the rules should be clarified a little more explicitely, I think :) Right now it says "Your banners (or their source photos) should be: Self taken and self uploaded; (...)". I assume this should then be "both the banner file and the source photo". Effeietsanders (talk) 16:31, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

I think we are not against page banners created from older photos, like previous WLM submissions. Does it answer your question? --Alexander (talk) 16:45, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders: will replacing "or" with "and" in "Your banners (or their source photos) should be: Self taken and self uploaded; (...)" address your concern? And to confirm: indeed my understanding is the latter case. --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 00:16, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

@Atsirlin and LilyOfTheWest: I'm still a bit confused, sorry! Atsirlin: if you're also accepting older photos (pre-2017), that means those are excluded from Wiki Loves Monuments. Which is not bad, but it just means you also have banners that will not participate in Wiki Loves Monuments of this year. So in that case, we should make sure that the WLM template doesn't automatically get added to those images. They would have to submit it separately (or someone has to check manually) to the 2017 competition. Effeietsanders (talk) 05:45, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders: both source and banners should be uploaded in September 2017, per the rules (after replacing "or" with "and" per above discussion). --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 05:49, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

@LilyOfTheWest: If that is the case, there is indeed a 100% overlap, if the author is the same. But I'd like to be sure that this is also Atsirlin's intention - his comment above might conflict. Effeietsanders (talk) 07:03, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders, first, no template is added in the current setting. We can't add a template through the upload link, a separate upload campaign is needed (see my comment in the beginning of this thread). If you like, I can run a bot and add the WLM template later. Second, I don't want to spend time on figuring out whether the source photo was uploaded or not, and when it was uploaded. Technically, the source photo does not matter. The banner itself should be under free license, depict cultural heritage, etc, and only the banner itself matters. We do expect people to use their WLM photos uploaded this year, and we do write this explicitly, but for us as end users it won't be a problem if 5% of banners are cropped from older photos, and another 5% have no source file on Commons at all.

In my opinion, right now we have a solution that should reasonably satisfy everyone. It does not pose any problem for WLM, because banners are uploaded without the WLM template. Later, one can decide whether the template should be added or not, and how. I think we can leave it like that, because there are more pressing tasks today, August 31, but we are certainly open to other solutions if you have any. --Alexander (talk) 07:17, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

I removed the clause about the source photos. This should raise any ambiguity. The only problem may arise due to crops taken from photos uploaded for WLM in previous years, but I don't think it is actually a problem. The 7:1 page banner is very different from any standard photo. It is basically a new thing uploaded to Commons, and it does require additional creativity, perhaps even more creativity than the photo itself. Even if the underlying image is the same, it looks differently when cropped to the 7:1 format, so I would consider it a new WLM submission, no matter what the source photo was. --Alexander (talk) 12:03, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders: I must admit that there is still a bit of confusion in the state of banners contest in that it's run under WLM but it doesn't have a WLM template. If it were to have a template, one thing is fuzzy and that is whether a 7:1 crop of an earlier submitted photo can be considered as part of banners (if it's really a subset of WLM). My suggestion is that we let the contest run and then review it in October 2017 to see what we have learned from it, what areas can be improved and/or whether we want to run it next year, too. Without having the engagement numbers and having a sense of the results, it's hard to figure out how much time we all should collectively spend on it. :) With this, I'm going to review the blog post Yaroslav and Alexander have shared and schedule it for release. --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 00:08, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Nomenclature and minimum size

As you can read both on en.voy, on it.voy, py.voy and on zh.voy (and perhaps other languages) the policy adopted by these versions requires a minimum width of 1800 px and a correct nomenclature (NAME banner DETAILS.FORMAT). Should these rules be adopted also in the contest or for this year is too late? Thanks (I don't know if you keep checked this page, so I ping Ymblanter that I know is involved in the project). --Lkcl it (talk) 13:07, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Pinging @Atsirlin: - this is a good point, but probably too late for changing the rules for this year?--Ymblanter (talk) 13:12, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

My thought was to add this rule writing something "all banners should follow wikivoyage nomenclature policy .... and they must have 1800 or more px in width" (please correct any my grammar mistakes) but, for this year, to not exclude from the competition those banners who have a wrong name. --Lkcl it (talk) 13:22, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Our general Wiki Loves Monuments experience is that we should not add too many requirements and restrictions, because they make people bored and reduce the participation. The size criterion is simple. I will add it now, and I think that all banners submitted so far comply with it. In fact, we say "crop banners out of your WLM photos", and most people do not submit low-res photos for WLM, so the banner size is fine too.

As for the naming policy, I am not sure we should require the participants to follow it. We can mention it as an advice, but I would not exclude anything based on such a criterion (neither this year, nor in any further competitions, should they happen). After all, having such a policy in several language versions of Wikivoyage has little influence on the overall situation, because other language versions do not have such a policy and will deliver you lots of page banners with "improper" names via Wikidata. --Alexander (talk) 14:51, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Check the changes here. --Alexander (talk) 14:54, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I think your solution is great! I'll update also the Italian translation. --Lkcl it (talk) 18:04, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Feedback about the contest

@Atsirlin: , @Ymblanter: I'm providing this feedback based on my personal experience trying to submit for this contest. This is not the views of the WLM international or WLM-IR. And of course, this is only one experience and I acknowledge that others may or may not have had the same one. :) With all this disclaimer: I found the idea of the contest very appealing, especially as the hard part is figuring out what monuments to take photo(s) of and uploading them. Once I'm there, creating a banner is relatively easy (and quite exciting,tbh:). One thing which was a blocker for me was that I had to choose that in my limited time whether I want to upload for the banners contest or WLM. I wished that the banners contest would happen after WLM was over: I would receive a message/email that I should go back to a list of the uploads I've had as part of WLM and consider creating banners for them. I think such a relatively low weight (from the participant perspective) contest can also help with the continuity of the work we do around monuments and our heritage. It's a nice way to bring people back after a short time and tell them that they can do something else which can help a project such as Wikivoyage. Anyhow, just some personal thoughts. --LilyOfTheWest (talk) 20:26, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks a lot LilyOfTheWest for your feedback. Alexander will correct me, but I do not think having the contest after the WLM (or say 15 September to 15 October) is difficult - we do not have such a heavy influx of banners, and, even though we need to decide which ones go to the articles it would be probably still doable until November 1.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:34, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

It is likely not a problem to accept banners uploaded in October. However, I would not know how to send all WLM contributors a reminder that they should consider uploading the banners after WLM is over. It may also be difficult language-wise, because not all participants speak English. --Alexander (talk) 21:27, 8 October 2017 (UTC)