many hundreds of new users (who had made themselves accessible)
species images for animals and plants as yet unrepresented in the commons (4 or so images fell into this category)
images from indigenous protected areas
species and habitat images from ecological communities
images from professional botanists which would fill some of the gaps
images from far-flung places as yet unrepresented in the commons.
To these ends, I contacted at least 3 IPAs, and many professional botanists. It is unclear whether any of these responded. Hope 7 was the only substantial hope to be realised. It was enormously satisfying to be creating new wikidata and new wikicommons entries for so many images.
We received 1510 images from 281 users, 261 (93%) of whom had never contributed before.
Banner message & banner. (Next year I would like an Australian banner)
Message on the landing page
& within the subpages
These were changed at various times throughout the competition, in an attempt to get images which satisfied the criteria. This was hardly ideal. I plan next year that these messages will be reviewed and agreed to and therefore hopefully not need changing. In some respects using European models for these led me astray: the Swedish message may well attract the kind of desired entries for Sweden. For the brief period I used it, I believe it was a mistake for our Australian competitors.
The organiser of WLE should be a member of the wikimedia Australia committee for the duration of the competition and possibly up to two months prior to its commencement. The 2021 competition suffered from this omission: there was no regular means of oversight, or communication to allow the necessary discussion.
The organiser should serve for two years (at least) so that fewer things are an unknown surprise.
The competition be organised by a committee of at least two: the organiser, and the organiser elect (whose role would be to advise and check on all technical aspects of the competition, and be a sounding board, and an advisor).
That judges not be paid. An enormous amount of work was required behind the scenes, once a competitor had uploaded a photo. The work was done very unequally and mostly not by judges. Remunerating judges seems to me unfair to those who did all the hard yacker and yet the nature of wikimedia is that we all contribute unequally. I feel that this precedent should not be repeated as it upset me deeply that those who had shouldered the burden of the work were those who were not remunerated. (I also find it contrary and contradictory in terms of our movement.)
that we issue media releases in all states and territories in an attempt to get mainstream media coverage (as well as social media) for the competition. Alex, Caddie. Can we measure our outreach on social media? I believe it was fairly minimal. I know of only three of us who tweeted just a few times, and although some of those were retweeted but I suspect to the same small community. I did a radio interview on WA ABC radio (very brief, and frustratingly not to the point).
that we monitor (ideally set up) the competition on a state-wide basis. This could engender competition between states and hopefully more images. It would be great to copy the German federal set up, but this is in my view too ambitious for next year.
That we have prizes for
peoples' choice. We can run the prejury tool as the Germans do, until the time for submission to the international jury. We can set the cull for the judges on any predefined date (this year 30 June 2021). We can and should perhaps run a banner inviting Australians to vote (using the prejury tool). If we were to attract numbers of voters in their hundreds by use of mainstream and social media, it would make sense to give a people's choice prize. This would encourage participation and interest (hopefully).
organiser's choice This would be a very kind recompense to the organiser, who laboured so hard. The photograph need not necessarily satisfy the international criteria.
These images contributed to multiple wikis and answered in my view a major purpose of the competition. None were able to win (two because they were too small and and the remaining one was not of sufficiently high quality).
Enteles vigorsii – a beetle which had no Wikidata entry. The photograph is poor but it led to a Wikidata entry, a category and an article. Invertebrates are particularly poorly represented in Wikidata and Wikipedia. We need to make a push for invertebrates and, in particular, to at least get most of the Australian Faunal directory IDs up on Wikidata. Enteles vigorsii in Lamington National Park
Nototodarus gouldi in Bremer Marine ParkGould's squid (Nototodarus gouldi) This is the only photograph in Commons of this species but there are two superb illustrations by Elizabeth Gould. The quality of the photo is poor because it has been extracted from a video. This was part of a wonderful series by Jessica Meeuwig taken from Baited remote underwater videos in surveys of the marine parks off the coast of Western Australia.
Use the German prejury tool on a statewide basis to make less work for individual jurors. This tool would continue to be used because unlike the Ukrainian jury tool it adjusts to incoming images.
Set the initial cull to 200
run the first round with the final judges as a thumbs up/thumbs down rating across 200+ images(dependent on cut point). This would use the Uraininan jury tool.
Use the 1-10 rating using the Ukrainian jury tool.
The following pages on commons all formed part the technical setting up and running of the competition. In some cases, they suffered important changes during the competition (Such changes are not desirable but were necessary in the view of the organiser and perhaps might have been obviated with more communication with the committee)
Participating countries in WLE2021 (This commons page was set up by the international organisers and completing the row for Australia permitted our participation in WLE for 2021)
Wiki Loves Earth 2021 in Australia (This was the commons "landing" page for competitors after clicking on the banner. It led them through the process. This page, too, changed multiple times during the competition.)
Commons:Wiki Loves Earth 2021/CentralNotice The central notice gave the words for the banner used to attract wikipedia users' attention to the competition. The wording was changed at least twice during the competition.
Competition images This page was a requirement of the international page.
Australian Prejury tool A link to the German/Australian prejury tool. An innovation in 2021. We terminated this on June 30, but next year would prefer to terminate it close to the final judging to allow a people's choice.
Each image (almost without exception) required that we:
assess its eligibility: by checking
its size; and whether
it was taken in a protected area
it satisfied licence requirements. This was checked only for the final images, via Google images reverse search and we found a number of images in the final group for judging which needed OTRS licencing. The reverse searches were undertaken after the competition, but probably should start to be undertaken for any photo that during the competition (given the number of problematic images.)
attach "depicts" statements to allow international judges (German, Bengali, Thai, Chinese, Arabic speaking, Nepali) to recognise that the image was taken in a protected area. This work frequently involved the creation (and filling out of) new wikidata items
attach meaningful categories to the images. Again, this frequently involved the creation of new categories (and new wikidata items linked to the commons)
Images that failed the eligibility criteria were put into the Category:Images from Wiki Loves Earth 2021 in Australia outside the competition. This was an enormous amount of work, which lessened the number of prejury images to look at. However, by the end of the competition, I took the view (and advised others) to simply rate images outside the eligibility criteria with a rating of 1. This would mean that they would never have to rate them again and that they would probably then be excluded in the first cull based on their average rating. In addition, I knew by then, that the final jury tool allowed me to set a blanket exclusion by size.
The massive task of adding "depicts" statements, wikidata items, categorising and adding categories for the majority of the entries was strictly only necessary for the images to be submitted to the international competition. However, in fairness to our new contributors and to the possibility of their images being used across wikipedias, it was a necessary task.
The majority of the competitors were not capable of putting up either useful "depicts" statements or useful categories.
Petscan query with uploader, date uploaded, imagename and other information about the Category:Images from wiki loves earth in Australia. A CSV file will be saved when, under "Output", and under "Format", "CSV" is selected and the "Do it" button is pressed. This was used for summarising uploads.
Judging: This year we used categories plus spreadsheets. However the Ukrainian jury tool (after nearly four months) was used for the final round. Next year I would hope to use of this tool much earlier in the competition. However, it is still the case that the Australian organiser is not able to do the initial setup. Hopefully, next year it will be available to us prior to the closure of entries. In which case it could be used for the cull, as it has the possibility of ratings (0-1) The (0-1) rating could be used for the cull and has some advantages over the German prejury tool)
Renaming: Many images do not have useful titles (or descriptions). When we have informed the international competition of our 15 photos, all items whose names need changing will be renamed. For example, DSC cfg.jpg is not found on a simple search. It needs to be renamed, as do most of this contributor's images. These should not be changed during the competition, because the prejury tool records recognises a renamed image as two entities.
Incorporating: A push to incorporate images into articles would be fantastic. This is more easiily done as images come in. I was very pleased to see the #WPWP campaign follow close on the heels of WLE2021.
This graphs shows that the images presented by the prejury tool were randomised. (Had they images been presented as first uploaded then we would expect some images to have almost 47 votes)
Uploaders were excluded from casting votes for their uploaded images
Culled to ~100 images using German prejury tool (47 raters)
47 raters who cast 16152 votes (votes/rater=437)
For the cull the cutoff of 3.1818 was chosen giving 101 final images
minimum number of ratings given for final images left from the cull was 11
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