Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Espana/2018/WLM

Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 (Learning story)

Context

Among the activities proposed by Wikimedia España, the contests and photography projects are particularly noteworthy due to the volume of content obtained. The objective is to obtain images with a free license to illustrate contents in Wikipedia and the rest of Wikimedia projects, always with the aim of disseminating our heritage through the Internet.

The first time a project of this type was organised in Spain was in 2011; since then the number and thematic variety has grown: monuments (Wiki Loves Monuments, since 2011); natural protected areas (Wiki Loves Earth, since 2015); festivals of touristic interest (Wiki Loves Folk, since 2016); sites of the Spanish Civil War (in 2016); and municipalities (since 2015). Each of these initiatives involves the creation of lists of those elements that can be photographed, always from official sources: for example, the monuments database of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, the Natura 2000 Network of the European Union or the autonomous catalogues of festivals of touristic interest.

Contest evolution

Wiki Loves Monuments is undoubtedly the most successful of all the contests. Its first edition took place in September 2010 in the Netherlands, and obtained more than 12,000 photographs. At the end of that year Wikimedia Nederland proposed to other Wikimedia groups the organization of the competition at an international level. The second edition was held in 18 countries, including Spain, and the last was in 2018. In total more than two million photographs have been obtained, being recognised in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest photographic competition in the world.

In the case of Spain, the focus of interest is, from the beginning, the set of goods of cultural interest, reaching around 15,000 elements. However, from 2015 onwards the competition focused on those elements that lacked any image in Wikimedia Commons, mainly monuments located in rural areas, which receive far fewer visits or are less accessible than those located in cities.

In addition to monuments without photos, since 2015 we have also added to the competition the lists of Spanish municipalities without pictures, with the aim of obtaining images under free license of all those population centres that do not have any free images in Commons.

What problems we found

After this decision the results were very positive and between 2015 and 2017 a good number of monuments and municipalities without photos were obtained, which encouraged us to continue with this proposal. However, for the evaluation of the images, it turned out to be very complex; there were several categories of prizes (best photo of a monument without a previous photo, more monuments without a previous photo, better photo of a municipality without a previous photo, more municipalities without a previous photo) so that organizing all the images obtained in such categories could only be carried out thanks to an automation of this process, since the manual revision of thousands of images was not viable.

The first years we had the possibility of this automation but in 2018 it was not possible so we decided to simplify the contest and return to the guidelines of previous editions to 2015, ie accept any monument catalogued as such and reward the three best images, regardless of whether they were unpublished monuments or not.

In addition, the automation process required every monument to have an identification code to facilitate the tasks of the bot; in general, in Spain, each monument is assigned a code, but there are cases in which this is not. That was already a problem. Besides, the lists of monuments were created manually by volunteers for the 2011 edition, but since then the update has been minimal, so that to these problems also added the outdated information.

Learning and future

Taking into account these problems, we have proposed as a solution to use as identifier of each monument the code of its element in Wikidata, which would avoid the problem of those monuments that do not yet have a unique identification code given by the government.

This would also facilitate the inclusion in the competition of regional lists of monuments, since in some cases they do not have codes for each one, which would bring us closer to the objective of documenting all the historical-artistic heritage of Spain, not only those monuments protected at a national level.

Therefore, one of the tasks being carried out is the creation of Wikidata elements for all monuments. With all of them created, we will be able to create the tables of monuments in Wikipedia automatically from Wikidata data, avoiding much manual work with templates. At the same time, if the databases are accessible, the updating of the data in Wikidata could be carried out automatically, with the savings in time and effort that it entails.