Grants:Project/Rapid/Gikü/Wiki Loves Monuments 2021 in Moldova

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. Be sure to answer the following questions:
1. What content will the contest focus on, and why is it important to your community?

After Moldova was one of the countries participating in c:Commons:Wiki Loves Earth for several years (and making a comeback this year), there finally is a possibility to organize Wiki Loves Monuments as well. WLE proved that photographer and volunteer communities of Moldova are interested in such contests, and this availability may help us push for better representativeness of the historical heritage of the country in the Wikimedia world.

I collected some insight from people involved in WLE Moldova on whether and how much they would contribute to a new WLE and a premiere WLM in Moldova. This was done through a Google Forms the results of which I am detailing below.

Preparations for the contest will help improving (and already do!) the completeness of articles related to historical monuments of Moldova on Romanian Wikipedia, particularly the overall lists of said monuments.

A gamified quest on bicycles will be organized within the community of amateur cyclists of Moldova, to take photos of various places in Moldova.

A side project of this grant – meaning that it would require only a symbolic amount of grant money – is a volunteer effort to import images from the Agency for Inspection and Restoration of Monuments (AIRM) of Moldova into Wikipedia. To accentuate the side-project status of this idea, all the mentions to it will be in gray letters. Back in 2016, AIRM agreed to release the vast majority of their photographic materials under CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Their archive contains about 20,000 images of an estimated number of 300 historical monuments. There is a page on rowiki – ro:Proiect:Imagini AIRM – that keeps track of which albums were released under CC, how many images of each were already transferred to Commons, and how many articles were illustrated with them. Until 2021, almost 2,000 images have already been transferred. In order to speed up the process, a volunteer effort will be set up on Meta Wiki similar to the Bulgarian Archives Challenge, in which Wikimedians will be invited to help transfer the images with correct identification and categorization to Commons, in exchange for souvenirs and virtual barnstars. The side-project will benefit from the organizational attention that the historical monuments on Wikimedia will be enjoying during WLM.

2. How will you let people know about the contest?

Multiple ways that had worked in the past for Wiki Loves Earth:

Promotion through a new Facebook page
- Sharing the announcement in multiple Facebook groups, both volunteering-themed and regional general-themed (by using and adapting this list)
A press release (to be completed) near the start of the contest
- Sharing this to multiple organizations that have an activity focused on preservation of national heritage and on tourism, as well as to some town halls
Participating in heritage-related events when such opportunities emerge
Direct contact with known heritage photographers of Moldova.

Asking participants of WLE to participate in WLM as well will undoubtedly ensure a base level of participants. We also plan to leverage the resources and experience of organizers of WLM in Romania, a contest in which I was also available to some extent in the past.

Organizing a gamified quest on bicycles within the community of amateur cyclists of Moldova, to take photos of various places in Moldova.

Community notification done at: ro:Wikipedia:Cafenea#Caut să obțin undă verde pentru Wiki Loves Earth și Wiki Loves Monuments în Moldova, 2021

3. How will you judge the contest and award prizes?

Jury is to be defined. For WLE, traditionally jury has had 2 professional photographers and me as Wikipedian. Jury evaluates submissions using the Montage tool, which I had used in the past for WLE Moldova and WLM Romania. User CEllen of WLM Romania confirmed that she can be one of the juries.

Awarding will take place in November and because of COVID-19 restrictions will almost certainly not be organized as a ceremony. It is believed that sufficient spotlight can be provided solely by the online announcements of the winners.

4. For photo contests, what is the strategy to get images used on projects?

Since this is the first installment of the contest, we will have a lot of coverage of monuments that had had no photos at all before. Several Moldova-based volunteers of Romanian Wikipedia (TotalAnarchy, Tolea93, NicolaS961, Zelialex) already help putting together the lists of monuments per district and will assist regularly adding images to the lists and individual articles in Romanian language. A categorization tree is to be created on commons: c:Category:Historical monuments in Moldova, and the image and Commons category properties will be regularly updated on Wikidata items with new submissions.

Images from the bicycle quest will either be uploaded by the participants, or – most probably – be gathered in a pool (e.g. Google Photos) and uploaded by me on their behalf, after them singing to release material under CC.

Usage of images from the side project with AIRM is being tracked under ro:Proiect:Imagini AIRM.

5. Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

Contest setup, jury meetings, and awarding will all take place online.

The only in-person event to be conducted will be the bicycle quest. However, the organizing part (explaining the rules and setting up a plan) will take place online, and the participants will be split in groups of two, with no need for the groups to meet each other. Since this plan does not require more than 10 people to be gathered in the same place, I posit that this grant request adheres to the rules of Risk Assessment protocol under step 2, and we will follow local health guidelines for our country (we already do).

6. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?

The project is organized within Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group, but since all its members – except the organizer of WLM Moldova – are in Romania, the grant is written in the name of the Moldovan side, to avoid exchange fees and unnecessary financial work.

I will further use this space to 1) describe the conclusions of the aforementioned Google Forms that people involved in WLE Moldova have completed, 2) propose a gamification format of a bicycle quest for objects of historical heritage, and 3) propose a gamification format of the effort of importing images released under CC license by the Agency for Inspection and Restoration of Monuments of Moldova.

Survey results (a total of 14 people responded):

First question collected respondents' usernames and/or names
Who are you in respect to WLE Moldova? 8 are past participants of WLE Moldova. 5 are past partners of the contest.
Are you a professional photographer? 3 said Yes, 11 said No.
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
Have you visited any historical monuments in Moldova in 2019–2020? 12 said Yes, 1 said No.
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
Did you have any copyright-related issues during your experience at Commons? 1 person answered Yes
(this question was about Wiki Loves Earth)
Have you heard about Wiki Loves Monuments? Have you ever participated in this contest in another country? 2 said No–No, 9 said Yes–No, 3 said Yes–Yes
On a scale of 0 to 3, how well do you feel that historical monuments of Moldova are brought into spotlight? Average: 0.6
Do you know how many historical monuments are there registered in Moldova? 3 said less than 100, 6 said 100–1,000, 3 said 2,000–3,000, 1 said about 5,000. The correct answer is 5,591
How many photos would you upload in the first installment of WLM Moldova? Based on the answers, their contribution would vary from 270 to 1,150+ uploaded images
How many historical monuments would you illustrate in the first installment of WLM Moldova? Based on the answers, their contribution would vary from 65 to 125+ illustrated monuments
This was an open-ended question about further suggestions on the topic. Several interesting ideas emerged:
- to offer small grants to veteran participants to travel to obscure subjects and document them
- to organize Wiki Loves Villages as well
- to organize a contest with similar format based on Moldovan ethnography

A gamified quest on bicycles will be organized within the community of amateur cyclists of Moldova, to take photos of various places in Moldova. The idea is to have several groups (about 5) of two cyclists each that will plan their own route under the following criteria:

The route has to have a length of 70–100 km, which is an OK distance for average (between complete amateurs and professionals) cyclists.
Quest will be based in Chișinău, so to guarantee fairness the route should not include objectives in the Chișinău municipality, of which there are, of course, a lot
Participants will plan their routes by themselves, to better control their output – hence the number of their collected points
Photos should be made of various places of interest (and each covered POI will award points): historical heritage, protected areas, churches, town halls, Kulturpalatsets, hospitals, schools, daycare facilities, mosaics, public transit stations, entry/exit road signs, etc.
- historical heritage photos will be awarded 4x as many points, in order to encourage the teams to hunt specifically for WLM objects
- protected areas will be awarded 2x as many points, in order to help enrich collections of WLE objects; since they are already well covered, there is no need to make participants focus on them more than on heritage sites
- More points can also be awarded for specific subjects; for example if Mosaics of Moldova becomes WLM Moldova's sponsor, we can award 2x points for mosaics
We may want the participants to take selfies of themselves next to the visited sites, in order to guarantee that their photos are not taken from the internet.

Importing images released under CC license by AIRM should be an international effort; there is no much need to know Romanian when a well-organized list like ro:Proiect:Imagini AIRM is available.

Inspired by the Bulgarian Archives Challenge, an AIRM Challenge (or Moldovan heritage challenge?) will be created. ro:Proiect:Imagini AIRM will be ported in it. The rules will slightly differ from Archives Challenge#Rules:

Importing an image - 2 pts per image
Writing descriptions of images - 1 pt per language and image
Editing (correcting, extending) the descriptions of images - 0.5 pts per language and image
Adding categories to images - 0.5 pts per category and image
Adding images to articles - 2 pts per language and article
Marking album as done in the list - 1 pt per album
Creating an article (in any language) about an object associated with an album - 10 pts + 1 pt per 1,000 bytes of information

All the points are to be self-reported.

Calendar / schedule

until June 31: preparing full list of albums donated by AIRM, and also reviewing the work done by Polish Wikimedians in importing materials from the same source
until July 31: preparing list of historical monuments
- January: importing the official list into Excel format (done)
- February: data review, and attribution of existing Wikidata items and Commons categories to the imported items (done)
- March–April: importing the list to Wikidata (5,591 items, some existing)
- June: preparation of Commons category tree
- June–July: importing the list to Wikipedia, partially based on Wikidata, in lists by district
July–October: side-project of importing AIRM material to Commons
August: promoting through WLM Facebook page, WLE Facebook page, press release, and off-wiki media
a Sunday in August: bicycle quest
September 1 – September 30: contest is running
October 1 – October 20: members of the jury are selecting their favorite submissions
October 21 – October 27: members of the jury gather to decide on the best 10 images
October 28 – October 31: the local results are announced and are sent to international team as international submissions
November 1 – November 8: awarding prizes to the winners
afterwards: continued list maintenance (adding images, Commonscat, coordinates)

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more:

The targets are as follows:

at least 3,000 photographies uploaded;
- at least 450 images used in Wikipedia articles on different languages (there is an estimated average of 15% usable images in the articles, as many uploads come in batches with more detailed images than needed in an article);
50 participants (photographers) with at least one upload
- of which an estimate of 30 newcomers;
at least new 300 covered of the total of 5,591 monuments (about half are archeological locations with no way of taking photos of them – their location is state secret).
within the bicycle quest: at least 300 photographies of at least 30 historical heritage objects + at least 400 photographies of other sites
within the AIRM challenge: at least 3,000 images imported

Prize categories

To diversify the prizes, a standard $60 prize will be instituted, and the winners can choose one of the following for that money:

gift certificate from the photography store Fotomax.md
gift certificate from the outdoor sports store X-Style
1-year unlimited online backup subscription at Backblaze

The table below lists all the prize categories. A single image cannot bring more than one award to its author.

Category	Prize
Main prize	2x $60 gifts
Second place prize	$60 gift + $30 gift certificate from Fotomax.md
Third place prize	$60 gift
Largest number of monuments covered by a single uploader	$60 gift
Best photo of a religious building	$60 gift
Best photo of a mansion	$60 gift
Winner team of the bicycle quest	Bike rear lights

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

Organizers:
- yours truly, with experience from organizing three installments of WLE in Moldova and contributing to organization of WLM in Romania
- TotalAnarchy with great contributions to setting up the monuments list and reaching out to potential partners
Jury:
- CEllen, organizer of WLM Romania
- more TBD/TBA
Partners:
- Faculty of History and Philosophy of Moldova State University
- RedescoperaMoldova (Re-Discover Moldova)
- more TBD/TBA
About 20,000 images donated under CC license by AIRM

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.

The table below lists the items that need to be purchased in order to fulfill the project scope.

Item	Number of units	Price per unit (MDL)	Price per unit (USD)	Amount (USD)	Comments
$60 gifts	7	1,054.13	60	420
500 MDL gift certificate from Fotomax.md	1	500	28.4594	28.4594	Complementary for second place prize
Refreshments for participants of the bicycle quest		700	39.8432	39.8432	Apples and bananas ~10 kg, energy bars ~50 pcs
Simple bike bells	10	19	1.1	11	Symbolic gift for each participant of the bicycle quest
Rear bike lights	2	500	28.4594	56.9188	For the winner team of the bicycle quest
Postcards and postal services for the AIRM challenge		200	11.3838	11.3838	Sending one international postcard averages about $1
Total				568

Note: USD amounts are based on exchange rates provided by Oanda on February 16 2021

Endorsements

Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

An important project that has the potential to improve the knowledge about the cultural heritage in Moldova among all people and to provide an enjoyable, as well as educational, activity for future participants. TotalAnarchy (talk) 05:29, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
Nice to hear about it. At last Moldova will join the contest. --Visem (talk) 06:10, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support Donarius (talk) 17:07, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support --Nenea hartia (talk) 21:22, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support --Terraflorin (talk) 05:34, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support --Turbojet (talk) 07:36, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support Andrei Stroe (talk) 08:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support NicolaS961 (talk) 16:01, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support --Sîmbotin (talk) 20:39, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support --Accipiter Gentilis Q. (talk) 20:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Strong support CEllen (talk) 22:14, 22 March 2021 (UTC)