Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Results and best practices

Wiki Loves Africa is organized in collaboration with most African based UserGroups. The way it operates is

• Wiki in Africa provides the global leadership, search funding for the global project and support local teams in their funding requests, manage the global infrastructure (website, social media, upload funnel), design and create communication material and templates, facilitate images review and improvement during and after the contest, provide a global communication coverage, lead the jury process, celebrate winners and distribute international prizes, provide training and support to local organizers and participants, and run satellite activities to increase the impact of the initiative as a whole
• Local organizers organize local or national activities. They may : request their own funding to WMF, set up and run a program of activities (training sessions, photo walks, upload sessions, run image description activities, promote the contest through social media or press conferences, create communication and outreach material, organize a national jury process and winning ceremonies with prizes, participate to satellite sessions etc.

In 2021-2, activities were essentially coordinated through a global mailing list (very little used), a telegram channel (very active), a couple of other channels for small focus activities, and a multilingual portal on meta. After several years of using different venues, the telegram group seems to have resulted in the most engagement.

For 2022, the full list of local groups organizing activities may be found on this page : Participating communities

Most groups are recurrent participants, though the level of involvement will vary depending on the size of each group as well as the experience and availability of its members. Groups are invited to only participate at the level of their own capabilities, to avoid putting undue pressure on the organizers that would exhaust them. Most groups receive funding from WMF, though there are issues for some countries which can not receive funding due to the status of the country relationship with the United States.

Amongst the challenges met, we might note

• language : most of the conversation is being done in English. There are real efforts though to run meetings, training sessions, etc. in English and French. We met difficulties to get translation in Arabic though, resulting in poor engagement from the MENA community.

Wiki Loves Africa at a project level is run by a small team. Being our 8th year, the competition team is well versed in the process of putting the competition together, but we must acknowledge that it is not possible to do this without the help of key people from within the community and we are endlessly grateful for their help in doing so.

As with last year, some hands-on help came from within the African community, due to in part to easier communications via the telegram channel, targetted organisational support webinars and the Wiki In Africa intern. We would like to thank the Wikimedia community across Africa (and beyond). This is as much their competition as it is ours and is intended as a platform for them to help build and sustain the growth of their communities through a celebration of local culture and experiences.

There are key people that provide continual assistance in the set-up of the competition on, and communication across the Wikimedia projects, this is no small task - thanks to

• Romaine, for setting up the site-notice banner and all uploading categories structure since inception
• Ji-Elle, for her tireless efforts to add description categories to images, add images to wikipedia articles, and provide encouragements to participants on their talk page
• Adoscam, for his work on adding categories to images, renaming images, and identifying/proposing images for quality/feature status
• GuillaumeG, for setting-up the images checking system and providing various support, such as on the Wiki Loves tool

There was assistance with translation and communications from many people. Over 30 people also volunteered to help do the first jury round to provide the first selection over no less than 16000 images (see first review team).

And last, but by no means least, the indefatigable work of the International Jury.

From the Wiki in Africa team, the main actors of the WLA project are

• Anthere, co-lead
• Isla Haddow-Flood, co-lead
• Ceslause
• Rachel, for social media work

At the end of the contest, one general survey and local organizers' interview were run by the organizers. The general survey was available to all participants. The interview was only for lead local organizers. The WLA 2022 survey was run October-December 2022 using a WMF Qualtrix account, while the local organizers interview sessions was virtual. 2022 survey information is published here : m:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2022/Survey.

Whilst it seems important to us to run survey and interview to measure

1. the impact on the local teams
2. collect their feedback and
3. poll them about the next year theme, we must admit that in spite of repeated reminder, the participant rates stay low.

The general survey answers are anonymous and results public.

The organizer interview is kept private, but an anonymous report is accessible on the survey meta page. In 2022, we got 6 local organizers interviewed, and 54 respondents from the general survey. It is a bit complicated to draw really significant results from the survey giving the limited participation rate. Still, generally, the participants are supportive of WLA, happy with the global organisation team work, wish that it continues, support same timeframe. Feedback on what worked well and what needs to be improved is collected and incorporated in that Results and Best Practices document. For example, feedback showed that online meetings were appreciated, and that teams wanted more of them. Accordingly, we will set up more regular Office Hours in 2023. Training sessions also got support, so we will continue in the direction of building up skills of participants and organizers alike. We also will improve interpretation of the theme.

The survey and interview reports show that people are in support of Climate and Weather as the theme for 2023.

Communications materials for printing and for online usage were developed by Creative Flood, and branded social media posts were created by Isla and Ceslause in several batches according to the campaign needed at the time, including : launch, extension and then #themeinsight campaigns,etc.

You can access the printable materials here c:Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Media#Documents. The interesting parts of the communication is each material issued and shared in English had a French counterpart and in some cases, Arabic and Portuguese, for example, posters, flyers, #themeinsight campaign, etc. This section has some of the communication materials that were used online

The following communications channels were created and updated with theme-specific branding and information:

• Meta organisers and project portal
• Commons upload and competition portal
• Website: www.wikilovesafrica.net

The following communications elements are available here and were created:

• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 international poster
• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 local information poster template (requiring information to be added)
• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Local Events Template as PDF(requiring information to be added)
• English launch press release
• French launch press release
• Portuguese launch press release
• English and French template of the launch press release (requiring information to be added by local teams)
• Arabic puzzle piece for poster
• English poster
• Arabic poster
• French poster
• Portuguese poster
• Incomplete list of mentions of Wiki Loves Africa in the local media
• Launch-specific Newsletter to ... Wiki In Africa English Newsletter subscribers
• Launch press release sent to ... media contacts across Africa
• English winners press release
• English winners newsletter (to come)

•  
  Wiki Loves Africa 2022 press release announcing launch in English
•  
  English launch press release as a template to be adapted by local organisers
•  
  Wiki Loves Africa 2022 press release announcing launch in French
•  
  French launch press release as a template to be adapted by local organisers
•  
  Wiki Loves Africa 2022 press release announcing launch in Portuguese
•  
  Portuguese launch press release as a template to be adapted by local
•  
  WLA 2022 A3 Poster in English
•  
  WLA 2022 A3 Poster in French
•  
  WLA 2022 A3 Poster in Portuguese
•  
  WLA 2022 A3 Poster in Arabic

Social media campaigns proved to be very successful. Materials for Social media were developed by Isla using the Canva platform. All materials can be found at this Google link.

Campaign series’:

• Launch: PR
• Webinars
• International Winners series (early August)

Facebook

• Link: https://www.facebook.com/wikilovesafrica/
• Posts

• 137 posts

• Page Likes increase:

• Jan: 33,767 2021
• June: 33,273 2021
• May: 33,888 2022

• Page Likes decrease

• December: 33,377 2022

• Analysis of results

• Predominantly Male (57.6%), but 42.4% were women, which is higher that last year's.
• Predominantly from Algeria, although this changes significantly with the targeted audience through advertising (advert target groups make a difference)
• The overwhelming majority are using mobile - this should influence ensuring that the Commons and website pages are clear on mobile
• Adverts are definitely the way to build likes and engagement
• The targeted campaigns with the addition of 1 specific advertising push increased the number of page likes on Facebook from 33,767 on 1st January 2021 to 33,888 (17/05/2022).
• Unfortunately, for yet poorly explained reasons, the Wiki Loves Africa Facebook account has been restricted from using promotions. The appeal, probably only examined by a bot, did not result in any unlocking. It looks like we will have to go forward without paid advertisement on Facebook

Twitter

• Link: https://twitter.com/wikilovesafrica
• Followers: 1,984 Followers (December 2022)
• Wiki Loves Africa twitter page has increased its followers by 328 since December 2022 through 115 tweets

'Instagram’

• Link: https://www.instagram.com/wikilovesafrica
• 59 posts (58 posts during Wiki Loves Africa 2022)
• 1,518 followers (increased by 489 by December 2022)
• 371 following

More needs to be done to increase engagement on Instagram - at the moment it is another space for similar materials that are fed to FB and Twitter. A specific Instagram campaign will be looked at in the 2nd half of 2023 to encourage more engagement, and hook new potential audiences for Wiki Loves Africa 2023.

These are .jpeg files below, but the .pdf versions can be found in Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Communications category, on Commons.

Consult this page for more information about Messaging and Talking to the Press about Wiki Loves Africa.

National teams could decide to host their own jury process, or not. Their process would not impact on, and were completely independent of, the decisions taken by the International Jury. National teams wishing to host a jury process were given guidelines the previous year, which they relied on for this year. This page of guidelines was then developed in the National Judging Charter to ensure uniform clarity, understanding and collective agreement as to the best and most ethical practices.

The International Jury process started in May. There were 12 members of the jury from across Africa and Europe. The mix featured professional photographers and experience Commonists. The selection process is explained here and was conducted on Montage. The the jury process communication has been documented in this Google doc. This was the expected timeline and procedure to follow:

1. First Review Round - yes / no round: a group of Commonists and Wikimedians who will do the initial weeding out (the First Review). They were a group of 35 volunteers, and were a different group to the International Jury.
2. First Jury Round - first yes / no round for jury.
3. Second Jury Round - rated round - 5 stars
4. Third Jury Round - yes/no to select top 30 images
5. Jury deliberation (Zoom) - Final discussion and selection among the jury members who could make it.
6. Final ranked round to select top 10 images, with motivations for top images.

First reviewers

• Images reviewed: 16,265

The initial round - first review round- was made up from volunteers who responded to a call that went out through various groups (Telegram, Facebook and then on the Commons village pump). 35 people over two rounds were part of the reviewing team. This meant that each image was reviewed by at least 5 times. Each reviewer looked at 1442 images. The criteria for their yes/no choice was based on the following:

• Images must be relevant to the theme
• Images should be at a useable size ('no' for images lower than 3mb)
• The obvious quality of the image - is it obviously blurred, pixelated, etc.
• The should be no watermarks or logos or timestamps
• Basically, all selfies, small images or blurred and unclear works should be marked as “no”.

First Jury round

• Images reviewed: 4,685

As mentioned, this is a yes / no round. Please do not vote for any image just because it is in-scope no matter how badly composed or structured. Please do consider the following elements:

• Encyclopedic value – does the photo present the subject with clarity?
• Subject Matter – is the subject appropriate to the theme Health+Wellness?
• Story Telling – how well does the photo evoke the viewer’s imagination or attention?
• Impact – what do you feel when you first view the photo. Does it evoke an emotion?
• Creativity – has the photo captured the photographer's idea, message or thought in an original and imaginative way? Without distracting from the knowledge provided by the image.
• Please also consider technique, composition, presentation, color balance, lighting and focal point/s
• Of course, the photos should be in focus (unless intended not to be) and should be more than 2 mb

Jurors were to vote "yes" for any image that you like (the framing, emotion, visual composition, etc.) and feel should be rewarded and vote “no" if a) they think the image was bad, blurred, not clear, poorly constructed photo, or b) if they felt the photo is not relevant to the theme.

Second Jury Round

• Images reviewed: 1085

This was a rating round intended to bring down the photographic pool to a manageable shortlist. For this round, the jury were asked to rate each image according to 5 stars, with 5 stars meaning exceptional and 1 star meaning the image should no longer be considered. The Jury were asked to consider the criteria listed for Jury Round 1.

Third Jury Round

• Images reviewed: 83

The Jury were asked to assess the images on this criteria:

• Technical quality: please keep the 'Featured Pictures' criteria of Wikimedia Commons [1]. This is especially relevant for resolution (a minimum resolution of 3 Megapixel is generally used), and digital manipulations (must not deceive the viewer). Community jury members, please could you check these factors and communicate any concerns on Telegram or during the discussion phase.
• Originality: it is probably clear what is meant: going beyond the usual and obvious, giving the photo some artistic quality.
• Usefulness: refers to usefulness in Wikipedia articles: the image must be clear, helpful in showing the monument or its details etc. It is not enough to be a 'pretty image' but it must also have descriptive value.

Fourth Jury Round

• Images reviewed:20

The Jury were asked to consider:

• Rank top 10 images.
• Consider the top winners to award 3 photographers.
• This is the last round - these images will reflect Health and Wellness in Africa - the best of African photography on an open platform. Beyond the encyclopaedic value, please consider your three or four top images in this light.

Final Jury Round

• Images reviewed:17

Jurors were asked to rank their final 17 images with a motivation for their top 5.

The International Jury report can be found here

• The idea of including past Wiki Loves Africa on the international Jury worked really well, as it propelled quality selection at each phase of the jury process.
• Getting all the international jurors to keep to the respective selection schedules was very challenging due to the other personal engagements of the jurors. There was also a sick juror, which delayed the process.
• It might be better to reach out to the international jurors as soon as the contest starts instead of waiting till after the contest. This could help replace in advance any juror with tendency of being absent or slow during the selection process.
• It would be great to have more past Wiki Loves Africa winners on the international jury in the future.

m:Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2022 (WPWP) is a project run by another group. WPWP is an annual campaign where Wikipedia editors across the world, Wikipedia language projects and communities add photos to Wikipedia articles lacking photos. This is to promote the use of digital media files collected from various Wikimedia photography contests, photowalks organized by the Wikimedia community, on Wikipedia article pages. Photos help to grasp the reader's attention better than a wall of text, illustrate content, and make the article more instructive and engaging for readers. Thousands of images have been donated and contributed to Wikimedia Commons via various advocacy programs, photowalks, and contests including international photography contests such as Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Folklore, etc. Yet relatively few of these photos have been used on Wikipedia articles. Today, the Wikimedia Commons hosts millions of photo images but only a tiny portion of these have been used on Wikipedia article pages. This is a huge gap that this project aims at bridging.

Every year, the WLA team participate to WPWP and provides

• lists of images to insert into articles
• prizes for the most active

In 2022, the rules were the following:

Winning prizes for the user with the most Wikipedia articles improved with images from Wiki Loves Africa. All WLA years are eligible.

Figures

According to the hashtag tool, we had (between July 11, 2022 and Aug. 31, 2022)

• 923 revisions
• 899 pages modified
• 15 users
• 220 projects

The tool shows that most of the edits were done on the English Wikipedia (130 edits), and second best was the English Wikipedia (70 edits)

3 editors pooled the majority of edits: 376 for the first one; 367 for the second, for 82 for the third.

• First editor: User:Shihab1729
• Second editor: User:Tarih
• Third editor: User:Kwameghana

Prize

Whilst all those edits were legitimate within the WPWP campaign, few edits made by the editors were actually not targeting Wiki Loves Africa images (in spite of being tagged #WLA...). We have decided to offer the Prize to the top 3 editors mentioned above. Congrats to them !!!

Issues and lessons

• There were no issues really. As for lessons, we once again learnt how challenging the entire WPWP campaign is, which has attracted criticism to this 2022 campaign. We have also learnt of the View it! Tool, which is currently being tested, and could help improve a campaign like WPWP should we decide to continue to engage in it in the future.

• As mentioned above, the two main editors actually tagged every single of the edits with #WLA. A sampling of their edits showed that probably none of the images they worked on were in any way related to Wiki Loves Africa. We will assume that it was a mistake and a misunderstanding from their part. It provided review work though, that should have not happened. We are not sure how to avoid that situation, except for trying to be even clearer next time about how to use the tags. It would also have been a good idea to identify that during WPWP, so as to ask them to stop (or use WLA images;)).

More info and tracking here : m:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/WPWP

This initiative is run by the WLA team and intends to improve the description of WLA images with structured data, using the Commons:ISA Tool.

ISA is a fun, multilingual, mobile-first 'microcontributions' tool, that makes it easy for (groups of inexperienced) people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.

With ISA, you can choose a pre-defined set of images on Commons and then ask contributors to 'tag' these with multilingual structured metadata. Points are counted for each contribution, and therefore it is possible to organize 'tagging' or microcontributions competitions or challenges with ISA.

ISA was originally built to provide better multilingual and structured descriptions of Wiki Loves Africa images. But it is also developed to be useful to all of the Wiki Loves Xcompetitions, and eventually ended up being meant for all media files on Wikimedia Commons.

The ISA tool was also designed to be a host of small competitions. To raise awareness around the tool, a drive is organized every year with the goal of enhancing the quality of structured data available on images uploaded to Commons during the past years of Wiki Loves Africa photographic contests.

The Campaign will be ran from end of 2022 to mid January 2023. Link to the campaign:https://isa.toolforge.org/campaigns/228

• Contributors: 48
• Images worked on: 15,912
• Total Contributions: 95,361

Final winner list

1. User:Oby Ezeilo: 31,483 contributions
2. User:Rwebogora: 20,759 contributions
3. User:Abatagatifu: 13,260 contributions

Elements that need fixing

• There is a discrepancy between the number of images collected on Commons and the figures given by The Wiki Loves Tool
• Haiti has no category for files without categories (in spite of some images having no category. Must be a set-up issue for Romaine)
• Haiti is not listed in https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/africa/2022
• ISA tool needs maintenance to continue showing data visualization for campaign results
• There is need to find a way around paying for Wiki Loves Africa Facebook Ads (Maybe pay for Instagram Ad to see if it boosts linked Facebook account?).