This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This report for a Project Grant approved in FY has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2020 coordination.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

Wiki Loves Monuments was a successful edition again in 2020. The competition itself had little problems and runs mostly on 'automatic' (both an advantage and disadvantage), but we did encounter a number of challenges in the more structural changes that we were looking at. There were 51 participating countries this year.

Project Goals

The international team has three main goals, as stated in our mission statement. These goals are:

to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage

to increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects

to bolster local Wikimedia communities.

Like previous years, we do this through a federated model, supporting local national organizers to do what they are best at. This year, we want to pay special attention to making Wiki Loves Monuments more future proof.

These goals are the same through the years, and we have worked the same way to achieve them: by organizing a photo competition and supporting Wikimedia communities with their monuments data sets.

We increased contributions and documentation of cultural heritage by welcoming 5180 new-contributor-participants through our competition with at least one upload on Commons. In total we 7666 participants contributing over 225,000 photos through 48 competitions.^[1]

We continued to provide a framework to welcome communities that were familiar with WLM, but welcomed new organizers from Gambia, Sudan, Rwanda, Mauritania, and Kenya.

Project Impact

Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.

Qualitative goals

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
1.1 In collaboration with our partners inside and outside the Wikimedia movement, we will support the shift towards Wikidata of our monuments infrastructure. 4 subgoals: A) An overview of datasets exists, B) A workflow is described, C) Existing tools are maintained, D) New datasets are supported in Wikidata	Limited progress was made on supporting Wikidata. The overview as existed still does, one or a few datasets now in Wikidata are supported.
1.2 Documentation aimed at heritage enthusiasts, explaining how to access the monuments datasets, exists.	Not achieved	No progress was made on this documentation.
2.1 Support of local teams: survey among the organizers.	Partially successful.	We were only able to survey the organizers, however, the analysis and report are still pending.
2.2 A great set of international winning pictures is selected	Succeeded	winners 2020
2.3 Where possible, our tools and documentation can be re-used by other efforts with similar workflows.	Succeeded	Both Montage and Wiki Loves Competition Stats continue to be used.
3.2 Number of participating local teams	(see below)	avoiding duplication
4.1 Sharing best practices through attending international events.	Not Achieved	Due to COVID all participation to international events were cancelled.

Content and participation goals

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Total participating countries	Succeeded (50 countries submitted to the international finale, one country participated but did not submit)	We set a goal to have at least 40 countries participate in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2020.
Number of newly registered users	Primarily an achievement for national organizers. In 2020 a total of 5180 participants created their account during the competition month (67%).	This is a metric that is expected to be largely driven by the national organizers. Therefore, we are not setting a target to meet for this metric. However, the international team is interested in this metric as a measure of the health of Wiki Loves Monuments ecosystem and we will monitor this number throughout and after the contest. There are underlying participation currents at work that we cannot explain - possibly related to the banner infrastructure. This total has from 2012-2019 fluctuated from 4797 to 12272.
Number of images uploaded	Primarily an achievement for national organizers. In 2019 a total of 212,598 images has been uploaded that is still on the wiki.	Similar to the above metric, the number of uploaded images is a metric that the international team does not have direct control over. We also support the migration of datasets to Wikidata, but due to this being primarily joint efforts, it is impossible to determine which are thanks to WLM international team. Note that these numbers are for a good amount driven by small groups of super active uploaders, which make these numbers high-variance. A downward trend is expected, as these high volume participants tend to focus on not yet or poorly photographed sites, which get harder to find over time. This number has from 2012-2019 fluctuated from 225,214 to 362,524.
90% of the participating countries nominate at least 1 image to the international finale	Succeeded	50/51 countries submitted at least 1 image to the international finale.
All critical infrastructure necessary for the start will be ready before September 1, 2020	Succeeded
The international team will ensure the availability of critical tools developed and/or maintained by the team throughout the contest and will monitor all other critical tools throughout the contest.	Succeeded
The international jury process is finalized and a jury report is published before the end of the year	Not Achieved	Winning pictures were posted on the wiki on 14 January. We did not complete a traditional jury report but only published later a blog post.

Story

Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

We're proud as every year of all the work that has been achieved by the national teams, and that we are able to facilitate that. The international team is struggling to continue to maintain sufficient energy to achieve its ambitious goals to better document and engage. This sometimes leads to complex choices that need to be made. We looked into opportunities to improve the reliability of the participant workflow. These efforts were met with additional challenges in the light of COVID in 2020.

We have, as can be noted from the overdue submission of this report, also been especially struggling with the keeping up with the reporting expectations. We're hopeful that we will manage to find more reliable paths to achieve a more helpful and insightful reporting while minimizing the workload that comes with it and appreciate efforts by the Grants team to help address this. Much of the work of this project continues to depend on limited volunteer resources.

With 10 years of Wiki Loves Monuments, suggestions for revisiting earlier decisions continue to pop up. This may range from the definition of what heritage sites should be allowed to participate, what constitutes a 'national competition' to questions about the judging practices. With dozens of national teams that have become important stakeholders over the years, and thousands of participants every edition, such changes never come easy, never come fast. We ask for everyone's patience and endurance as we look to consider constructive proposals and appreciate how different the challenges are across the world. The international team has also especially recognized the need to better support a cultural and geographical diversity of participation and continues to welcome proposals to improve broader participation.

Survey(s)

If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2020/Participant Survey Report

Other

Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

We would like to refer to the various links provided elsewhere in this report. Other than that, a multi-year repository of documentation can be found here and the various links on the stats page link to the uploaded images. Our page on Wikimedia Commons gives also an otherwise good overview.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

No explicit traditional learning pattern was created, but we instead invest this energy in our ongoing documentation and communication with national teams.

What didn’t work

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

We touched on some points earlier in this report with room for improvement.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

Some of the opportunities for improvement or new areas that we would be exploring in during the year of 2021-22 are:

During conversations with the Community Resources team, the International Team realized the need to integrate the strategic direction of knowledge equity deeper in our work. In the wake of George Floyd's murder in the United States last year, there were anti-racist civil rights protests sparked in over 60 countries on all seven continents. Many sources referenced it as one of the largest (some sources said the single largest) globally distributed civil rights movement in history. Monuments played a prominent role in protest actions associated with this movement. We would like to acknowledge this. It is not only about acknowledging an important social issue that is closely tied to "monuments" but also pushes the campaign in a new direction. Several options, including special prize/category etc. are in consideration. However, we feel that only having a special prize or a category won't address the issue completely, as the meanings of oppression and their relations with monuments are quite varied across the globe, and not to make the work US- or Europe-centric. In some countries, this problem is also tied to the lists of monuments themselves or how governments define what a monument is and what is not. With the additional DEI budget, we would like to hire consultant(s) to help us explore this area in collaboration with the national organizers and other stakeholders.
Exploring rest of the world competition: The idea is to explore the possibility of organizing a competition for rest of the world i.e. for countries not having a national competition. This has come up several times in the past, we explored the idea a bit last year, but it didn't materialise. For this year, we would like to explore the possibility and model of such a competition in detail, and hopefully get in running in 2022.
Developing step-by-step guide for participants: Though there are a lot of pages containing instructions for participants, there is a no single guide to which the participants can refer. We are envisioning to have a graphical 1/2-pager document, with enough information for a complete outsider to Wikimedia, to participate. This can be translated and localised by national competitions.
Follow-up with the participants: The idea is to follow-up with participants, especially those who joined Wikimedia through the competition, at regular intervals after the competition is over. This can include a simple message on talk pages of the participants on what they can possibly do after the competition is over. This may improve retention. We will be conducting a data analysis to understand the retention of editors after 3, 6, and 12 months after the competition is over.
Stabilizing the team and get the competition going: Some long-standing members of the team are going to stepback from the core group this year in 2021, which will require several transitions internally. Our goal is to make sure the international team has sufficient human resources to run the competition successfully this year. We will also be exploring the idea of having paid support for programmatic activities of the campaign for further years. We had brief conversations with the Community Resources team, our fiscal sponsor Wikimedia Austria, and organizers of Wiki Loves Earth who are having a similar model.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

coordination/Finances

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

Yes. EUR 2,929.82 from the first installment (EUR 11,750.00) have not been used. The second installment (EUR 10,250.00) has not been requested and not been transferred (for details please see 2020 coordination/Finances)

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

As agreed upon with the Grants Administration Wikimedia Austria keeps the remainung funds for now and they will be deducted from the 2021 WLM international grant's second payment. Both grants have the same grantee (WLM international team) and fiscal sponsor (Wikimedia Austria).

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of EUR 2,929.82 were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wiki Loves Monuments 2022-23 International Coordination and Prizes.

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

Yes

Is your project completed?