User:Chicocvenancio/WLM 2019 proposal

This a collectively constructed document to better expose our thoughts about Wiki Loves Monuments and our proposal to organize the 2019 edition in Brazil. In particular this is a response to Effeietsanders and the international WLM team questions posted in a talk page. We lament not adhering to the length recommendation and we are available for any questions the international team, or other wikimedians, may have. Chico Venancio (talk) 15:57, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Are you currently organized in an officially recognized affiliate

We are not currently recognized by Affcom. In 2018, all Brazilian user groups were de-recognized. The de-recognition, however, has not impacted our activities, and we are a formal non-profit organization in Brazil, with over 30 members in eight states. Members of our group --including very well-known Wikimedians globally-- as well as some members of friend affiliates, like Wikimedia Portugal, will be directly involved in this activity.

The idea to have editors from Portugal in our activity is thought of as sharing resources and best practices. We have already collaborated with these editors in several outreach initiatives and programs.

Who's will be the WLM organizers exactly

The team is not closed, and we would seek and encourage volunteers up until August. For now we have the following members and assigned tasks:

• Chicocvenancio - Coordinator
• Joalpe - Wikidata integration and institutional outreach
• Teles - Social Media
• Sturm - Upload Curation
• Ederporto - Technological Support
• Alchimista - Technological Support (WLM-PT)
• DarwIn - Upload Curation / Wikipedia connection (WLM-PT)
• GiFontenelle - Upload and Metadata Curation / Dissemination

We have reached out to and received support from volunteers from other countries to support us with bot work and content curation, including WLM organizers from Portugal.

what is your collective experience in organizing Wiki Loves competitions

• Chico - Wiki Loves Science 2018 and Wiki Loves Love 2019
• Sturm - Wiki Loves Earth Brazil 2014
• Alchimista - Wiki Loves Monuments Portugal 2011
• DarwIn - helped curating Wiki Loves Earth 2016

Can you elaborate on the status of the lists and your approach to them

The current list for Wiki Loves Monuments in Brazil has been kept over the years terribly small and mostly non-geographically indexed. In our view, this has greatly limited the impact WLM has had in Brazil, has led to an exclusion of vast areas in Brazil from the contest and contributes to a constant repetition of photographed subjects. Our local Wikimedia community has not been engaged to the last editions of WLMs, and to engage our community will potentially bring more people to contribute to elaborate and curate lists with local knowledge. To broaden the reach of the contest we plan to improve and expand the list of eligible monuments with these tactics:

• Scrape national and state level heritage sites lists, to be fed to Wikidata:
  • The current list has some of this done on the national level, but is limited to the general title of each site. Several of these sites are in reality a complex of several monuments, in some cases a significant portion or even the entire city is considered a heritage site. A simple entry for those cases does very little to encourage participation. There are monument inventories and studies done on several of the sites that untangle those sites into several self-contained monuments, we intend to scrape as many of those as we can find and broaden the list in that manner.
  • Only one state has its heritage sites on the eligible monuments list (São Paulo), we intend to include the state level protected sites of every state.
• Scrape city level heritage sites lists:
  • Only one city has its heritage sites on the eligible monuments list (São Paulo), we intend to have at least the top 100 most populous cities.
• Broaden the definition of “monument” and find other sources:
  • Even with National, State and City level heritage sites, several locations will have few monuments to photograph. The whole state of Acre, with its 152,581.4 km² and over 750,000 people currently has a single eligible monument and would only be increased to 4 with state level heritage sites.
  • To improve this situation we would study other authoritative sources to draw from beyond officially recognized heritage sites, so that local knowledge on what is perceived as a monument is more effectively taken into account.
  • To start, sites that are in process of being recognized could be easily scraped from the same government lists.
  • We would also reach out to universities, governments and other interested parties to suggest potential sources for monument lists that go beyond the traditional legal brazilian “heritage site” definition.

We obviously understand the definitions above to be a large task and that it would probably not be complete in the first iteration for the 2019 contest. Unlike other countries Brazil has no centralised monument database and the proposal is to, in effect, build one. To easily merge information from the different sources outlined we would use Wikidata as the authoritative repository, preserving source information and metadata on the items. This fundamental integration with Wikidata would allow for easier listing, querying and laying out the monuments on maps. We have already worked on feeding Wikidata with several more diversified monument items, which we will then automate to establish an organic process; as we bring to the team very experienced Wikidata editors this process will be obviously be curated and reviewed.

What is your approach towards partners

We have several partners that would be interested in a specific cooperation the subject of heritage and monuments. We’ve had successful partnerships with both the Cásper Líbero Social Communications school and the University of Maranhão in documenting buildings in Wikipedia in education initiatives, both have indicated a willingness to help. There have already been educational activities that we have coordinated to document all monuments in the city of São Paulo; we are working on initiatives to reproduce this kind of activities in other cities --and of course this can be set up in coordination with a WLM initiative.

To broaden the partnerships we would also reach out to national, state and city entities for heritage, culture and tourism. Beyond the basic monument data we discussed previously, help with promotion and even prizes for local submissions would be suggested.

Our group has also sustained the largest GLAMWiki initiatives in Brazil --some of the largest in the world!--, and these initiatives may evolve towards WLM partnerships, i.e., organizing backstage photo visits in historical buildings, spreading out announcement of the WLM edition.