Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments/DEI research 2022/Final report/Recommendations

Overview

Introduction

Learnings

Recommendations

Possible roadblocks

What is in the pipeline?

Appendix

Collaborative exercises within WLM

Regular discussions in the form of office hours along with regular communication through emails always help in keeping organisers up to date with recent developments in the competition and share best practices with each other. However, engagement with such mediums is not always as enthusiastic as expected.

One way to boost engagement could be through introducing tangible outcomes to some of the discussions and collaborative exercises. This may help emphasise the need for conversation among peers, and reinforce the fact that each voice and perspective matters to help structure and run an inclusive campaign.

These tangible outcomes can be imagined as the following:

1. A blog series on various themes such as interconnections between politics and monuments can be a great way to talk about how local political contexts shape the way monuments are understood and documented in each country. The resulting blog series can not only act as a storytelling tool, but also help sensitise new organisers and jury members to local contexts and help make informed decisions in choosing the final photographs.
2. Have people from under-represented communities participate in follow-up editathons for WLM photographs. This could perhaps happen during the following Wikimania, after WLM has concluded. This helps local communities take charge of their knowledge and tell the story of their heritage from their own perspectives. This could also be an interesting way of adding metadata and relevant archival images of the monument.
3. WLM has a rich repository of photographs, from monuments being used for rituals to images depicting the loss of one. Participants can be encouraged to engage more with this digital repository though short films or documentary workshops. This will not only help them upskill, but also share stories and experiences related to their community heritage with a wider audience.

Focused engagement through dialogue between Wiki Loves competitions

Focused interactions with individual countries are important to gauge the intricacies of organising WLM in the region. How do we get people motivated to participate in the competition? Why do organisers find it difficult to host the competition despite having financial aid? These kinds of questions require us to dig deeper into regional politics, local perceptions and related cultural aspects. By incorporating this knowledge we can begin to imagine initiatives and solutions that may help organisers get a step closer to their diversity, equity and inclusivity goals.

These focused initiatives require a lot of man hours and local collaboration initiatives, which may be beyond the bandwidth of the WLM international team. However, structured dialogue between Wiki Loves campaigns can help us ease into this imagined initiative.

Given that there are multiple Wiki Loves digital photography competitions, each working with similar technology, resources and regions, conversations between them can help reduce duplication of efforts in finding workable solutions to shared problems. It gives us a chance to learn from each other's successes and mistakes. Discussion such as this would also be effective in learning about local environments and specific needs of a country. This may also aid better documentation through coordinated efforts and distribution of local resources effectively across the different Wiki Loves competitions.

Getting ready to organise

A digital competition such as WLM assumes a basic level of digital literacy among organisers and participants. However, this digital literacy is multi pronged, each with its own learning curve. From understanding how to navigate Wikimedia Commons to figuring out uploading lists to Wikidata, there are multiple steps in organising the competition that can seem overwhelming to first-time organisers. It may be difficult for new organisers to navigate this especially if there are no local user groups or affiliates to offer guidance. Acknowledging these learning curves enables us to create resources and facilities to make sure that participants and organisers from these have an equitable experience.

Following are a few measures that can help ease new, and old, organisers into hosting the competition:

• Hosting office hours and ‘getting started workshops’ for new and old organisers. These can help national organisers share best practices of what worked and what did not in their countries and learn from each other's experience. This becomes especially important for those regions that do not have any active user-groups to help them.
• It would be helpful to collate a document of outreach strategies that organisers from various countries have used over the years. This can be adapted by local organisers according to their local cultural and communication needs.
• Many national organisers and partnering user groups have over the years created ‘How To’ videos to help local old and new Wikimedians understand the various stages of the competition - eg, how to use wikidata, how to upload photos to commons etc. Links to these can be added to the WLM FAQ page to facilitate better understanding. A section about the kind of financial grants available for the competition, what kind of costs are covered and a general template for a grant application could also be added to the FAQ page.
• A guide on how new organisers, who are also new to wikimedia, can navigate wikimedia commons to find relevant information and get in touch with people would help them get started.
• Technological accessibility is an issue for new and old participating countries alike. Working on and creating more accessible technology that is not data heavy and is compatible with low internet bandwidth is important to ensure continued and diverse participation.³

Note

3. ^ WLM Brazil has been working on developing a mobile application that is not data heavy and makes uploading photos and finding monuments easier through smartphones.

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