User:MCruz (WMF)/Sandbox/Program Reports/Wiki Loves Monuments/Key takeaways
We examined the results in terms of the stated priority goals program leaders shared in their reporting as well as outlined critical next steps toward program learning.
Read this page to learn the most important takeaways and recommended next steps.
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One of the goals for Wiki Loves Monuments is to increase the number of freely available photos of historical monuments. The program's success in this area is obvious. Over the years, Wiki Loves Monuments has produced an impressive number of images under free license that can be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles, as seen in this table:
The sheer amount of new images that got freely available is amazing and it's also very commendable that the global Wiki Loves Monuments organizers were continuously able to broaden the list of countries that participate in the contest. When it comes to the other goals for Wiki Loves Monuments, like e.g. "making contributing fun", things get more complicated. The number of returning existing contributors seen for Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 indicates that a good amount of long-term Commons photographers enjoyed the 2012 event enough to come back a year later. But a new user survival rate of 1.7% six months after the end of Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 is troubling. Event organizers have crafted a popular event that attracts new contributors to Wikimedia Commons, a major hurdle for the Wikimedia movement throughout all the projects, and they should be commended for doing so. But just like textual contribution campaigns, this image contribution campaign suffers from issues prevalent throughout the Wikimedia projects. Without a significant investment in technical resources to make the contributing and interacting interface on Wikimedia Commons better and community consensus to make Commons more welcoming to newcomers, it's hard to imagine image upload campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments will achieve a higher retention rate of new contributors. Such challenges within the Wikimedia Commons project are not the fault of event organizers, however, and certainly the significant amount of photos uploaded through Wiki Loves Monuments demonstrates the competitive elements of the photo contest and the act of finding locations and taking and contributing photos indicates they do well at making participating in the Wiki Loves Monuments competition fun, even if the challenges of Wikimedia Commons' user interface and workflows removes enough of the fun that contributors don't stick around. One of the Wiki Loves Monuments goals that 60% of our survey respondents reported to us is to "Increase the support for open knowledge and the free content movement". Given the number of people who participated in the contest and who had never before released their images under a free license is an indicator of general support for free knowledge, it is unclear what other program mechanics have been put in place in order to achieve a change in attitude among the participants. However, this area offers a lot of potential. For example, it might be possible to include information about the benefits of free licenses in the upload process (maybe at the end of the upload, in order to encourage participants to upload even more images under a free license) or to highlight the benefits of free licenses in press releases and on the local contests' websites.[1] Overall, Wiki Loves Monuments is one of the biggest success stories of the last couple of years when it comes to programmatic activities that fill content gaps. Its success has been supported by the general shift of the web to become more visual and the widespread availability of photographic devices. And it is one of the very few programs that shows impact at scale.
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Given the fact that a comparably large number of chapters received grant funding, we were able to better establish a basic cost-benefit baseline for Wiki Loves Monuments than for any other program covered in this ongoing evaluation. Keep in mind that given we used data mining from grant reports, this section only addresses Wiki Loves Monuments implementations that were funded by grants, not unfunded implementations. Our cost-benefit-analysis comprises of data from Wiki Love Monuments implementations from 20 different countries, which received WMF or FDC grant funds, representing 12 out of 35 (34%) countries which participated in 2012 and 15 out of 51 (29%) countries which participated in 2013 (7 countries are represented in both 2012 and 2013 data). The average median budget of these events (2012 and 2013 combined) was $3,615 with a high of $29,102 and a low of $392. The average median number of photos being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons per country was 5,635 with a high of 32,987 and a low of 1,572. Looking at the cost per uploaded image, we get to the following results:
As photos that are being used in Wikipedia articles reach a much larger audience than those that are not included in articles, we also looked into the number of images that are currently (as of November 4, 2013) being used across Wikimedia projects. As the usage of images increases over time, we only included the numbers for 2012:
Knowing the cost for an image that got uploaded through Wiki Loves Monuments and that's also in use on Wikipedia and elsewhere is important as it allows us to compare that number to its equivalent from other photo upload initiatives. Now, is $3.03 a high or a low price for a photo of a monument that's in use on Wikimedia projects? Ideally, we would like to know how the cost per used photo uploaded through Wiki Loves Monuments compares to the costs in a scenario where we would have relied on business photographers to shoot those monuments. In order to make that comparison, we would need to know the following: Average time that a Wiki Loves Monuments photographer spends on
Once we have those numbers, we can calculate the costs that would incur if a professional photographer would offer the same services. Our report on other photo upload events, which will be released next week, contains an example of how this can be done.
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Over the years, the global event team was very effective in continuously improving and promoting the concept, which led to a growing number of countries joining the competition. The global event team also offers support for local organizers about legal advice and questions around promotion, prizes, and potential partners. Furthermore, the global event team has become continuously more sophisticated in documenting the event and providing the community with tools to measure the competition's results. All of this makes Wiki Loves Monuments the one program within our programmatic landscape that has the most cohesive and clear set of goals, measures of success and documentation for replication of success. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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As with all of the programs reviewed in this report, it is key that efforts are made toward properly tracking and valuing programming inputs in terms of budgets, donated resources, and hours invested in activities related to planning and implementing the contests as well as comparative costs. In addition, it will be important to track particular participant cohorts so we can investigate recruitment and retention. In 2013, the Wiki Loves Monuments dashboards were designed to link to uploader lists by country, so this should be easier in the future. Lastly, further investigation of expectations and efforts directed toward the many other goal priorities is needed, including for the top two goals of: increasing awareness of Wikimedia projects and making contributing fun. To some extent these may be answered by the survey administered by the WLM International team this year; to whatever extent there are relevant survey data there or not, it will be important to more clearly articulate programming activities specifically aligned to those goals and to develop strategies for program leaders to measure those potential outcomes. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||