Grants talk:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 in the United States/Report

Hi SuperHamster. Thanks so much for this detailed grant report and all of the team's efforts to organize WLM 2017 in the US. Congrats on a successful contest! The number of participants, photos, and photos used on Wikimedia projects is very impressive. In general, we see a decline year-on-year in terms of participants and photos so I don't think that is too surprising. It's great that the US has the most number of participants -- what do you think is the most important outreach tool that you're using or is the combination of different avenues? Doing the pre-jury filtering also sounds like a good step to make the process more efficient. I'm not sure if many other groups do that and I'll be sure to advise recommend this as best practice. We appreciate your thoughtful reflections on what to do next year to improve the process -- please let us know if there is anything we can do to support this. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:54, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi @AWang (WMF): Thanks for the kind words! The vast majority of WLM-US contributors are first-time editors who find us through the geo-notice. US's population is a big boost of course, many of whom own a smartphone capable of taking decent photos. As you probably saw we also include local- and state-designated sites in our contest, contrary to most other countries who only include federally recognized sites - so our scope of sites to photograph is much larger. We've also worked to make our landing page quick and friendly to get users to upload. These are much more minor points, but we also maintained active Facebook and Twitter, organized a photo walk in SF, and asked some historical societies to get the word out.

A personal thought I wonder about is how much of it has to do with American culture - peoples' interest in visiting historical sites on vacation, having patriotism in those sites, sharing those photos online, etc. - though I'd be surprised if that differs much from other nations.

We actually got the pre-jury filtering idea from WLM-UK I believe, and it was definitely a big help for us. Something we'll definitely be employing for 2018, and recommend for others who run into the same problem of many photos to judge. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 19:43, 6 May 2018 (UTC)