Wikimedia UK is seeking volunteers to help with the organisation and running of the 2024 Wiki Loves Monuments competition, which will run again this year in September.
Wikimedia UK have participated in the international photo competition since 2013, where participants upload images of listed buildings & scheduled monuments to Wikimedia Commons. The UK has a 4-nation competition, and then submits the top images to the international competition. In 2023, over 13,000 UK images were uploaded to the competition.
There’s a variety of different opportunities for community members to be involved in the competition, from small tasks to bigger ones, and we’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in joining the team!
There’s lots of ways to get involved, depending on your skillset and your availability.
Smaller tasks
- Categorising and sorting images during the competition
- Screening images before the judging process
For those with a little more time
- Producing web content to promote the competition
For those who’d like a bigger project to work on
- Reviewing and updating the data on Wikidata
- Running small events to engage people in the competition
Running the competition (behind the scenes work)
Reviewing & updating the data on Wikidata before the competition starts. The competition relies on lists from heritage bodies in Scotland, England, Wales & Northern Ireland. A good deal of data already exists in Wikidata, but there may be additional sites to add, sites to remove or re-categorise, and the quality of the data generally could be improved:
- This work needs to take place before the competition kicks off in September, so could be worked on between May-August.
- We have some suggested workflows and ideas for checking and improving the data, but are also open to ideas! We’re looking for people who have some degree of familiarity & comfort with Wikidata, including bulk upload / editing and data modelling. We can also provide training in OpenRefine if volunteers would like to use that tool.
- Ideally we’d like to put a small team of volunteers together to work collaboratively on this part of the project, rather than one person being expected to do everything. We’re happy to work with folks’ availability, but as a general guideline we’d like to start this process in May, and be finished by the start of August. (If we finish earlier that’s a bonus! But we want to offer flexibility.)
- We’d also like to have regular check-in meetings (probably on zoom), and would be available to help, coordinate and answer questions throughout.
Helping to categorise and sort images during the competition itself:
- When images are submitted to the competition, they’re placed in the main country category, however they do need to be checked, and it can be helpful if additional data can be added.
- We’re looking for a group of volunteers who would be happy to check in on the category for multiple days during the competition, and check around a dozen images each time. This is a role where all contributions would be very much welcomed, whether that’s one day or ten days!
After the event, screening images before judging:
- When it comes to judging we have two main stages. The first stage is preparing a long-list of 100-200 photos for the judging panel to look over. We need as many volunteers as possible to check over images to make sure they’re eligible and grade them. Each image is seen by multiple people. This takes place in October and sometimes November – each volunteer contributes a couple of hours.
Public engagement with the competition
We’d love to have more voices producing website and social media content about the competition:
- Would you like to write a blog post to advertise the competition, about what heritage means to you? Record a couple of minutes of audio on why you took a picture of a particular building? Make a short video about participating in the competition? Please get in contact if you have ideas!
- We’d like to have some content available to post in August in the run up to the competition, as well as to post throughout the competition in September. We’re very happy to chat about ideas for content, as well as scheduling.
Running small events to engage with the competition:
- In the past, we’ve run photo walks paired with a Wikimedia Commons training / upload session, and it would be great to have at least one of these running in each part of the UK. We’re looking for folks who could be event organisers or trainers to make this happen.
- This is a bigger task, and we have some funding available to support volunteer grants for items such as venue hire, admin time, and travel expenses (around £250 per event).
- There’s a lot of scope for creativity in how these events would run – you could partner with a local library or museum, a meetup group or a group of students, for example.
- These events should take place in September (ensuring that all uploads were made in time to be eligible for the competition), but planning would need to start in July to allow for advertising & marketing time in August.
If you’re interested in any of these volunteer opportunities, please fill in this google form, and we’ll be in touch to organise a chat!