Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wiki Loves Monuments 2025-27 International Coordination and Prizes

In previous years the Wiki Loves Monuments International (WLM-i) organizing team applied for and received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation directly. For the upcoming grant circle, planned to be covering the years 2025 to 2027, the budget of WLM-i will be included in the grant of the project’s fiscal sponsor, Wikimedia Österreich (WMAT). The amount will remain dedicated to WLM-i. The inclusion only serves to reduce the administrative workload on the organizing team, leaving the administration of the finances and grant applications to WMAT while the team of WLM will stay in charge of all decisions on its use and spendings, as outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding between the two parties.

Following are the details on the application of the WLM Organizing Team.

Team 2024/2025

Volunteers: Ciell, Erinamukuta, Romaine, Rodelar, Iwuala Lucy, Slaporte, Mesha Murali, KCVelaga, Ndahiro derrick

Staff (general project coordination, 15h/w): Manfred Werner (WMAT)
Communications, xh/w: vacancy

Scope

International and global. WLM international is open to and supports any (usually) national WLM initiative to be part of this international contest. It aims to include as many countries as possible. In 2024 56 countries entered the list of participants.

Programmatic Planning

The Wiki Loves Monuments International (WLM-i) team’s mission is to improve the documentation and raise awareness of built cultural heritage around the world; first of all within the Wikimedia movement’s projects and, by doing this in Wikimedia’s environment of free knowledge, also beyond them. The global scope and the approach to do this by organizing and facilitating a federated, low-barrier photo competition aims to motivate participants to contribute to Wikimedia projects and to bolster local Wikimedia communities around the world. Most of the work is achieved with volunteer efforts. The budget that would be provided through this proposal is primarily used to support international awards, staff support for the volunteer efforts, translations and technical support for maintenance and improvement of tools.

With the experience of the past thirteen editions of the competition, the international team focuses on the following key areas for the upcoming years:

Curation of resources

There is a range of resources developed over the years, used on the international level and provided to the national participants, that requires maintenance and further development. This includes but is not limited to documentation (guides and support on organizing and participating, monuments database etc.), campaign infrastructure (upload wizards, central notices), technical tools (mainly Montage). All of these have to be updated regularly and need updates and revisions to take into account new developments and according to the needs of the campaign and the people involved.

Support to national contests

While established campaigns, which are generally backed by regional chapters, require minimal to no support from the international team, however, countries participating for the first, for initial few times or after changes in the team of local organizers do require the team’s attention and assistance. Every year the international team needs to support many local teams on a case by case basis on setting up campaigns, use of tools, promotion etc.

Support knowledge equity

During 2021-22, the international team facilitated a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion review of the campaign, which has helped to surface several challenges faced by national organizers and also suggestions on making the campaign more inclusive. From these results, we already did and will continue to explore ways to implement recommendations into the future editions of WLM. Main approaches to achieve the project’s goals. WLM is a continuous effort to improve the documentation of cultural heritage globally through media, primarily images, on Wikimedia Commons and thus in all Wikimedia projects. According to this mission there are certain components of the campaign which take place every year with more or less the same approach. Apart from the standard components of the campaign, we would like to further improve in the following areas:

Support to national organizers

While campaigns backed by established affiliates do not usually require much support from the international team, many require regular follow-up from the team and support to set up the necessary infrastructure. In recent years, owing to several reasons including the pandemic and transitions within the international team, the number of countries participating declined but we already could reconnect to several national teams that have not participated in the last few years and the number of contributing countries went up again. We want to deepen these collaborations, solve problems they may encounter, provide crisis management for national contests, learn where we as an international team may be able to help and otherwise search for contacts in our network that can. At the same time, we will also invite national organizers in countries that have not participated before or for a longer time, but have indicated interest.

(Re)connect with partners in- and outside our movement

We already began to reconnect with our partners in Wiki Loves Monuments after the pandemic. We want to strengthen contacts with Europa Nostra, which has already been our partner since 2011, but also find new partners for collaboration. On a local level contacts may support the national organizers in setting up their photo contest by providing a working space and internet access, among other things. This would also take up the suggestion from the DEI report, to build a larger international network to support the photo contest on a local level. Within the Wikimedia Movement, we would like to collaborate with other groups and initiatives that focus on the documentation of built heritage. There have been presentations and meetings with members of the team of WLM at Wikimania Singapore and Katowice in recent years, as well as at Wiki Indaba to connect, discuss and share ideas with others from the movement. To both the national organizers and affiliates as well as (possible) partners outside the Wikimedia movement, the international team is actively reaching out to collect feedback and suggestions. We plan to revive the office hours to communicate with the WLM community, for example by continuing, beside new topics, the conversations about “International wiki photo competitions and armed conflict“ that have already begun.

Maintain the infrastructure of the competition

We continuously support national teams with the setup and maintenance of the technical infrastructure for uploading and of the CentralNotice. After having to delay this for some time due to difficulties to find a developer, Montage, the central tool for the jury process, is currently being updated. Improve documentation and language availability for WLM Work on user-friendly documentation has already begun and has to continue. Still parts of the documentation that has been developed over several years is sometimes outdated and often only available in English. As recommended in the WLM 2022 DEI research we already began to make it available in languages other than English too. A lot of pages around the competition still have to be translated or the translations completed and the available information has to be updated. This includes the WLM newcomers guide and other documentation created to help organizers and participants. Besides that we will continue to facilitate communication channels like wikilovesmonuments.org and our social media channels which require ongoing attention.

Outreach

There are mainly two groups of people engaged with Wiki Loves Monuments, participants and organizers. Participants are users who upload images during the competition, and organizers include national organizers, the international team, and other stakeholders.

For participants

Central Notice is one of the most effective ways to inform the community about the competition when it starts and also newcomers, who are participating in the campaign for the first time. In addition to central notice, we use our social media channels linking to relevant blog posts on our website and complementing the channels of national chapters and organizers to inform the non-Wikimedia communities. Recently we developed a strategy for our outreach on social media, for sharing updates, but also for engaging with past international prize winners and (former) members of our international jury to increase the awareness of our competition. Special prizes are ways to encourage contributions/participation from specific groups. We have seen special prizes for a region help to increase participation from the respective region regarding the number of contributions. Such special prizes can be awarded to newcomers, underrepresented regions, emerging communities etc.

For organizers

Our main channel of communication with national organizers are mailing lists. We have set up Telegram channels as well which proved to be helpful for quick troubleshooting and pinging the international team. We want to pick up monthly office hours again where national organizers can gather to discuss challenges and share ideas, along with a specific topic of focus. As already practiced, more proactive communications will be done during the outreach phase of the campaign.

In addition we produced stickers and badges for WLM and also postcards with winning pictures of the last contest which showed to be very welcome when shared for example at WikiIndaba and Wikimania.

Website and social media accounts

Strengthen the joint effort of the international organizing team

We will continue to hold regular internal online team meetings to review work done and plan for the work that is ahead. Besides that the international team has in-person meetings scheduled for 2025 and 2027. Additionally we are constantly looking to find new volunteers and will continue in the period of 2025 to 2027 to welcome new members to add expertise and effort.

Timeline

For the WLM International Team, the yearly cycle starts around June/July, with active outreach to the (potential) national organizers and communications about the upcoming competition. We help the national teams with setting up landing pages if requested, creating the category structure and the banner- and upload campaigns on Commons. The photo competition itself runs from September until October, wherein national organizers are free to choose any time period ranging up to 31 days. The international team is standby for problems that may arise, and in the meantime will prepare the international jury. The top 10 images from the national contest need to be sent to the international team by December, the jury deliberates in Jan/Feb and the winners are typically announced in Mar/April of the new year, with prizes being distributed until May/June. Q2 of every year is a time where the international team reflects on the past cycle, possibly onboards new members and takes time to prepare and communicate on a more meta level about the upcoming year.

Metrics

Target	Description	Target
Net promoter score	NPS is one of the metrics that we use to calculate satisfaction rate. According to the 2023 organizers’ survey the net promoter score for support received from the international team is 54 (the score is calculated as [promoter% - detractor%]). Generally a score of 50 or above is considered good.	50
Number of countries participating	Number of countries participating in total.	50
Returning countries after a pause	Number of countries that did not participate in the last three years.	5
Participants in our evaluation surveys	Percentage of participants that participate in our evaluation surveys.	40

We use the following tools to measure our metrics

wikiloves.toolforge.org
quarry.wmflabs.org
montage.toolforge.org
Surveys for which we will be using Qualtrics (qualtrics.com) under WMF-provided license

Finances

The requested budget is for three years in alignment with WMAT's cycle from Jan 2025 onward. Due to the nature of our competition and as explained in the timeline, our expenses are not equally spread out over the year.

Amount requested from WMF:
2025	75,848.00 EUR
2026	53,348.00 EUR
2027	71,348.00 EUR
	200,544.00 EUR

Budget for this proposal

item	Header category	expense item	2025	2026	2027	total	avg./year	notes
1	Personnel related expenses	Project Coordinator	18,336.00 €	18,336.00 €	18,336.00 €	55,008.00 €	18,336.00 €	15 hour/week general project management
		Campaign Communication and Outreach support	6,112.00 €	6,112.00 €	6,112.00 €	18,336.00 €	6,112.00 €	5 hours/week paid support communications: strategy social media, website, etc.
		Dev. support for technical tools	5,000.00 €	5,000.00 €	5,000.00 €	15,000.00 €	5,000.00 €	Montage additional updates, website maintenance, Monumental, Wikidata improvements, Erfgoedbot update, possibly new tools
2	Services	International prizes	10,200.00 €	10,200.00 €	10,200.00 €	30,600.00 €	10,200.00 €
		Award for national organizers	250.00 €	250.00 €	250.00 €	750.00 €	250.00 €	new
3	Communications	Paid advertisements social media etc	250.00 €	250.00 €	250.00 €	750.00 €	250.00 €
		Swag: stickers, buttons, cards, etc	1,000.00 €	1,000.00 €	1,000.00 €	3,000.00 €	1,000.00 €
		Postal costs	200.00 €	200.00 €	200.00 €	600.00 €	200.00 €
4	Services	Translation support	6,000.00 €	1,500.00 €	1,500.00 €	9,000.00 €	3,000.00 €	translation of static pages and participants guide on Commons
5	Grants and contributions	Micro-grants to national teams	2,000.00 €	2,000.00 €	2,000.00 €	6,000.00 €	2,000.00 €	$300-$500 per applicant
6	Travel & Events	Travel budget int. team	4,500.00 €	4,500.00 €	4,500.00 €	13,500.00 €	4,500.00 €
		International team meeting	18,000.00 €	0.00 €	18,000.00 €	36,000.00 €	12,000.00 €	Meeting in 2025 & 2027, covers travel and accomodation, visa, etc.
7	Other	Contigency	3,500.00 €	3,500.00 €	3,500.00 €	10,500.00 €	3,500.00 €
8	Administrative	Fiscal sponsorship fee	500.00 €	500.00 €	500.00 €	1,500.00 €	500.00 €
	total		75,848.00 €	53,348.00 €	71,348.00 €	200,544.00 €	66,848.00 €

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