CentralNotice/Request/Wiki Loves Monuments 2021

Wiki Loves Monuments 2021

• Romaine (talk · contribs · page moves · block user · block log), primary contact (Requested at 08:52, 8 August 2021 (UTC))

Central Notice Settings
What is the campaign duration? 1 September/October/November 2021 → 30/31 September/October/November 2021 Which projects will you be targeting? WP/WM/C/D/VOY What languages will you be targeting? multiple Do you wish to show banners to Logged In users, Anonymous Users or Both? Do you want to target users with a specific number of edits or average monthly? all What countries will your campaign target? list of countries Banner/Campaign Diet: To be determined by Central Notice admin

What is the purpose of the campaign? How will you measure the success of the campaign?

Description - the annual photo contest for heritage monuments

Metrics -

What banner(s) will you use? What will be your landing page?

Banners -

Landing Page - multiple

Is this project grant funded? Please provide a link

Type of grant -

Link to grant -

Discussion

Hi Romaine, since there have been more and more campaigns that run for several weeks, and more feedback from communities commenting on the constant and long banners on their projects, could you please share the intended diet you will set for this (these) campaign(s) and the considerations you will be weighing? Ciell (talk) 11:04, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Let us be aware that there are are different type of banners with different ways how they work.

Visitors to Wikipedia see the banner for Wiki Loves Monuments, click on the link and learn about the photo contest. Then, during September in many countries there are open heritage days and participants go out to take photos. After they return home, participants need to be able to find back the contest page, which they can find again through the banner. Putting a diet in place that restricts the number of views shown to someone or something like that, would basically make it impossible for participants to find back the contest page. In other words, making it impossible for them to participate. Therefore there is no intention to change the settings in comparison to earlier editions of Wiki Loves Monuments. Of course the banner is only shown in those countries where the local communities organises the photo contest. If someone does not want to see the banner, the banner can be clicked away. For someone who does not want to see any banners for photo contests, there is also a possibility to hide all photography banners.

If you still think a diet should be in place, this requires a community wide discussion with full involvement of the international team of Wiki Loves Monuments and all the local organising teams and communities. This because putting a diet in place seems at first sight an easy thing to do, but in practise would require huge changes to the setup of Wiki Loves Monuments, because participants need to be able to find back the landing pages easily, otherwise they can't participate. Romaine (talk) 21:59, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Romaine:, thank you very much for your thoughtful response. The way I see it, there are indeed all those local communities that are organizing their national WLM contests and I in no way have the intention in saying they should not have access to the banners.

On the other hand though, we also have the language communities to consider, as well as our visitors. As you must have seen yourself as well, the requests for banners and specifically month-long banner campaigns have increased and I would really like to emphasize that we need to coordinate for all different campaigns to get the same amount of attention: we should avoid in competing each other for the banner space for a language or for a specific country.

When the WLM team started using the Central Notice banner for the competition, they were on of the first to do so, if I remember correctly. All I am asking you now is to be considerate of others in the way you will be setting up the campaigns: a repeated diet, with a 2 days interval for instance, might have the same overall effect, but is way less intrusive and leaves room in the banner space for others, or even a short period without any banner, which can actually be a very refreshing sight as well and makes people notice a new banner even better.

If you could like me to attend a call with the WLM international team about this, I am more then willing to do so. Ciell (talk) 10:28, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Ciell: In my opinion, no banner campaign should be run without a diet. We already suffer serious banner blindness (and disabling) in our community and the tags can only be a plaster. Another one for these issues are the cookies which can be reset after some days. I usually choose 7 days cooldown for such several-week long campaigns but I'm open to reduce it to 3 days, for example, if need be. Personally, this might even be more appealing to readers and editors because this overwrites the status of closed banners but shows them again. Besides these options, there are various other settings for CentralNotice campaigns but most of them likely do not fit here. And last but not least, participants of photo contests around the world have to note the name or place of the contest in order to participate. Of course, we can use a wooden mallet method (as it would be called in German) but there is no need for that, in my opinion, to reach the same goal. A change to the landing page that the page should be noted somewhere (if necessary) should be easier to manage than a possible outcry about annoying banners. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 15:02, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

do you need a certain request for the WLM-banner? the German WLM-organising team assumed that it appears "automatically" because it's an annual contest? Greetings --Z thomas (talk) 11:09, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

@Z thomas: We have to renew the request each year. However, we're making the request at the international level (this request), to reduce overhead for everyone :) Effeietsanders (talk) 11:47, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders: thanks for your answer. so, we needn't to do anything to get the banner in the german wikipedia :-) --Z thomas (talk) 11:53, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Other than the usual, no. If you want to make sure, check out this page for instructions for organizers. There's always translations to update, landing pages to define etc. But I suspect this is by now so engrained for y'all, that it no longer needs mentioning. Effeietsanders (talk) 12:05, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

From my perspective as Ukrainian WLM organiser, we would prefer having no diet or, in the worst case, not very restrictive diet.

I understand the arguments of banner blindness. In the Ukrainian community we make sure that there is no other major campaign during Wiki Loves Monuments, due to strategic importance of this contest for our community. Indeed sometimes we might have two or three banners running in parallel in Ukraine, but those are lower priority campaigns with diets.

I think we ran WLM (or it was WLE) with a moderate diet once, and this resulted in frequent cases of potential participants getting lost (e.g. asking us on Facebook what the dates are, or not being able to find the upload link). Note that participation in WLM is not always immediate: people often notice the banner, get the idea (cool, I need to picture a monument!), picture the monument the following weekend and want to upload them — but may fail to find the banner.

Another weakness is alphabet: Ukrainian uses Cyrillic alphabet (Вікі любить пам'ятки / ВЛП), while the international campaign uses Latin alphabet (Wiki Loves Monuments / WLM). Unless you remember exactly the name (which rarely happens when you see the banner exactly once), you will probably take a while to find what you need without a banner.

The worst thing is that any diet disproportionately affects newbies, as experienced Commons contributors know what WLM is and how to find it. And this is really bad for WLM Ukraine, as we have a quite big community of experienced photographers who will participate anyway, but we really want to attract new contributors who never uploaded a picture to Commons (or even never edited any Wikimedia project) before. WLM is quite good at it, please do not make it weaker. If you set a diet, please make it minimal (e.g. show the banner on every second page). It would absolutely not meet its purpose if an uploader has to wait for a week (or several days) to see the banner again — NickK (talk) 14:09, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Comment, Hi @Ciell:, WLM is the Guiness World Record holder for being the largest photographic contest in the world. It should have a special privilege in the Wikimedia world as one of the most prestigious project undertaken by the communities of different parts of the world and so, it should not be on a banner diet. As an WLM organizer form India, I totally concur with what @NickK: said. The central banner is the only thing to draw attention from newbie photographers roaming around through different Wikimedia projects to direct them toward WLM and they comprises of a significant portion of WLM contributors, (see stats for evidence). We will definitely lose almost all of them if banner diet comes to place for WLM which we cant afford for many countries esp. from the Global South ones. I request you to put the central banner in place as only two days are left to start the competition and we do not have time for experimentation or seek alternatives at this moment. Thanks in advance. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 06:34, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi Bodhisattwa, having been around in the Dutch community back in 2010, I know the accomplishments WLM has gathered in the past 10 years and the stats you link show this. And even more so, I my opinion the organizing team should be very aware of the privileged position they have had for ten years already and it should not be used lightly. A diet does not mean potential new participants will not see the banner: we can set a cycle to every 7 days, or maybe even every 5 days. There is a way in the middle of attracting new using and annoying the already excising users, we should be open for. Ciell (talk) 09:38, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay, it have been extremely busy days this month.

As I tried to say earlier, I am trying to make sure a banner works, but decision making around banners should be done with the international in dialogue with the local teams and the broader community. The discussion on the mailing list and here is very very limited in comparison to the number of people involved. This is concerning.

Another concern is that the proposal above, to implement a diet with a "cooldown" is I think enlarging an existing problem (banner blindness) and creating a new problem (new participants who can't find back the instructions page, aka less uploads). Let me try to explain.

Banner blindness is influenced by for major factors:

1. The first factor is how many different banners a person sees in a certain period. If someone sees 6 banners in a certain period, banner blindness is worse than only seeing one banner in that period.
2. The second factor is how many times a certain banner is visible above the pages. If a banner is only shown five times, it is less blinding than when seen 50 times. If a banner disappears, a lot of users will think this banner is gone (but when a cyclus is in place the annoyance can be larger, see 4).
3. The third factor is on how many different wikis someone is active on which the same banner is shown. If a diet is put in place (let's say 5x shown) and a user has visited above that number of pages, a banner disappears (or after clicking it away), that same banner will re-appear when that user visits another wiki. A diet does not work cross wiki.
4. The fourth factor is how many cycles a banner is shown to a single user. (A cycle means that when someone got a banner a few times, after some time (days/weeks) a banner can be shown again for a few times.) While this is actually the same banner, a lot of users would experience this as a second/third/etc banner, or in other words, the banner blindness is higher.

(There can be also other factors in place, like banners that are shown but are relevant for only an extremely low number of viewers, as well as banner designs (like moving flags) that can create much annoyance, but above I just focussed on the different ways of how the same banner can be shown.)

The third factor (in my opinion) should have been fixed already five years ago and is a long standing problem. However I do see some progress, you can now disable certain type of campaigns in your preferences if you do not want to see them: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners.

Concerning the proposal to put a diet in place with repeating cycles: At first sight this proposal seems to be helpful to reduce banner blindness and annoyance for banners. However, users would not get the banner once, but four times (factor 4), which would cause 4x the annoyance, and if they work cross wiki this would double/triple/etc the amount of banners they experience (factor 3).

But more importantly: this diet would cause a major issue: new editors can't find back the instructions page of the photo contest when they re-visit Wikipedia (or the page is otherwise much harder to find back). In other words: a lot less photos uploaded by a less diverse amount of uploaders.

I am a huge fan of diets, but above all a banner (+diet) must by suitable for the goal of the banner. In other words, the WLM banner has 2 goals: 1. to inform people about the contest ongoing, 2. after participants have made photos they return to Wikipedia and then the banner has as goal to enable participants to find back the instructions page. The proposed diet is obstructing the second goal and is damaging for the photo contest. Romaine (talk) 01:56, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Hello everyone, thanks for contributing to the discussion. Given the comments from various organizers, and not having a clear consensus towards a diet, the international team is unable to take any hard decision on proposing a new diet. Even though I was personally inclined towards proposing a diet based on a discussion with CentralNotice admins, it seems like a discussion with national organizers is necessary. We don't want to impose changes that will have a huge impact on the competition. As of now, we also don't have previous metrics to act upon. Considering all, our proposal for this year is to proceed as it was done before. We acknowledge that this is an important topic to discuss, and will do a consultation with all stakeholders, including organizers, CentralNotice admins, and probably a few participants, to decide the best approach for further iterations. We intend to do these discussions much before the competition starts, rather than when we are close to it. Hopefully, we can gather more metrics this year regarding CentralNotice, that will help us in making a decision for further iterations. KCVelaga (talk) 15:26, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi @KCVelaga, this is really a missed point from last years organizing team, I am sad to say. I have talked to Romaine repeatedly about alternatives in setting up these banners, and how one single campaign cannot claim the banner space in our projects for a whole month anymore - we moved on from the unique situation that was created in 2012 for WLM, to many community initiatives from many communities all requesting a spot in the same space. This way of claiming of banner space is completely inconsiderate and against the current Central Notice Usage guidelines.

Let me also point to last years banner discussion where the English community already spoke up explicitly on Meta. I proposed to Romaine to work together with another seasoned CN admin in a) documenting the present set up of the WLM banners, and b) working out a better way to balance the interest of the organizers and participants, without losing the support of all our local communities. It saddens me that nothing came of this. Ciell (talk) 09:52, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Independently of WLM, I'd like to have the opportunity to document with you the historical situation WLA was in. Is that possible to find out which were the different banner situations WLA had in the past ? I would be interested to document that because I tend to forget from one year to the next and I think it could be useful. Contrariwise to WLM, we have time until our next contest. And just as WLM, we are impacted by such decisions, perhaps even moreso as most of our participants are newcomers. Anthere (talk)

Proposing a diet is not an alternative but an obstruction, as it demolishes a large photo contest. This has been made clear multiple times but apparently is ignored. You haven't proposed any solution that is without major problems.

I have seen the process of the guidelines, most of the stakeholders were not involved in the drafting at all. Also the community involvement was extremely limited. But still, having the banner for Wiki Loves Monuments for a full month shown is not forbidden by the guidelines. Yes, many communities ask for a spot for their activities in banners above Wikipedia/etc, at the same time Wiki Loves Monuments is a major community driven event for what the communities reserve time and space. It is not so much the international team who claims the space this month, it are the local communities who demand a banner to be there for this large Guinness Book of Records size event. This banner exists thanks to the support of the local communities!

The English community exists out of thousands of users, while on the Meta page about a hand full of users replied. Claiming that "the English community already spoke up explicitly on Meta" is just untruthful.

"I proposed to Romaine to work together with another seasoned CN admin" -> Really? Maybe you forget to communicate that to me, I checked, zero e-mails about this in my mailbox, not on Whatsapp, not on Telegram, not on Signal, not on my talk pages (Meta, Wikipedia, Commons), not on the Commons talk pages of WLM, not on the 2020 request page, the one thing I haven't tried is mind reading.

Please end your framing attempts. Romaine (talk) 10:59, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

As I had mentioned on the mailing list, this is a issue we don't really know how to model, although we are pretty sure people is noticing the banners, and then relying on them to find the contest again. And we don't know the extent these changes would have. It should be desirable to, at least, be able to record the needed data so that on other years a better informed decision can be taken.

Some ideas:

• Some kind of "I am interested, but not now, please remind me later" option in the banners by which those interested could click and then not be affected by the diet (but how many of them would recognise they need to click that to see the banner later?), or be sent a reminding email.
• The annoyingness of the banners could be reduced if after having seen the banner for X times, rather than completely disappearing, it changed to a "collapsed" banner which still allows to find the contest but took much less screen space.

These probably require code changes for implementing such new features -I am trying to think on solutions, not on the options we currently have- if they are considered desirable. It is possible that the collapsed banner could be implemented with a combinations of a "big" banner using a diet and a "small" one with lower priority that only showed after having seen the previous X times (but I don't know what might happen when there are multiple competing banners in place and then we attempted to link some banners that way).

Platonides (talk) 01:35, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, if there is a wish to reduce the amount of banner views, the main question is how to make sure participants can find the instructions back. You mention two possibilities, with a local photo contest we used a different method: participants were asked to create a wiki account, then asked to fill their e-mail address in a form, so they could be informed by e-mail about where the instructions to upload can be found. This method has one major concern we must be aware of: privacy and security risks. With a global photo contest this seems very tricky.

Your first idea is something I have thought of before in a different situation. With the dozens of courses I organised with universities, many participants find it often difficult to find the project page back. This same issue arises with photo contests. The navigational infrastructure of Wikipedia/etc is not helpful for this. I doubt if this idea can be created easily.

Your second idea is an interesting one and I think this can be a way to go for banners with the purpose to have participants find their way back. The CentralNotice system seems not able to provide this option yet. Also the design (and text) of the small banner has to be developed yet.

How large or small a banner is is for the system (currently) not much relevant: only one banner at the time can be displayed. Romaine (talk) 10:09, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi Platonides, thank you for this. Both snoozing of a banner a an email reminder are options that are being developed by the WMF team as we speak, they hopefully will be implemented next year (Q1?) Ciell (talk) 10:21, 2 September 2021 (UTC)