Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2013/Arab World feedback
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Introduction & Background[edit]
Arab world is a central region in the old world, located on the crossroads of Africa and Asia. According to the most common definition, it consists of the 22 countries that are members of the Arab League (over 10% of the world countries, inhabited by about 5% of the worldwide population), which have, mostly, a majority of population speaking Arabic language.
In the last year, although 35 countries from the six continents participated in WLM, there were none from the Arab world. This year was the first to have Arab countries participating, starting with five; Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, & Tunisia. It worth to be noted that three out of those five were facing major political unrests during the last few years, with one of them suffering an ongoing full-scale war.
From the five Arab countries participating, only one had a pretty organized and mature Wiki community that's able to support large-scale projects, which is Egypt. However, Egypt, for several reasons, couldn't benefit from its great community in making a successful WLM contest. Other countries had some small communities as well. In Jordan and Algeria, there's already a small education programs initiated at the beginning of this year, and there were plenty of other Wikipedia-related activities in Jordan and Tunisia. However, in one particular country, Syria, we don't have yet any strong community. Actually, Arabic Wikipedia version is blocked in Syria since 2008, so there's only a handful of contributors living inside the country.
Planning & Organization[edit]
The organizing teams of the region's contests were small, peaking at five or six people (Jordan & Tunisia), down to as low as two (Syria). For this situation, there was no organizational structures in any of the contests, however, there were sometimes an 'unofficial' roles for each individual in the team. In Jordan, for example, we had the following roles for the team members; one website developer, one online communications coordinator, one on-ground coordinator, and two general organizers.
One of the initial problems we had was the unclearness of the organizing steps. Yes, you might say that the timeline is enough, you might expect that the things are simple and smooth, I can myself feel now that they are, however, it should be more taken in mind that this's a contest organized by volunteers with few if any experience in organizing large-scale projects, they will be scared at first and will need a very summarized instructions as simple as possible. I would've wished to have a clear & simple guide in an easily accessible place, like: steps 1, 2 and 3. For example, gather volunteers, set up lists, talk to institutions etc. That would've helped a lot.
Possibly, the biggest challenge in the organization may was finding a lists to make the contest about. The concept of a "Monument" maybe as common as candy for a European or American, however, here the concept itself is missing, and that was a serious problem. Only two countries, Algeria and Tunisia, had official category named 'monuments'. In the other countries, we had a lot of bad time and arguments with uncooperative governmental institutions, finally depending on some semi-official lists with very few sites. Actually, we had in one country (Syria) to depend solely on the list of UNESCO heritage sites with only 18 monuments (lowest number in the competition), which was extremely disappointing.
Running the contest[edit]
No matter how amazing was the organizational efforts, the critical part remains in making a contest; by attracting participants and collecting photos. And the key element in doing this is getting a good advertisement for your competition. In the Arab World region, it's possible to define 3 main strategies used in attracting participants & collecting pictures:
- Collaborating with interested institutions: it's essential in any project that you have to collaborate with other institutions that shares goals with you. In a competition like WLM, possible interested institutions may include heritage organizations, photography societies, and, first of all, wiki communities. Two countries were involved on the level of attracting participants with some institutions; Jordan (collaborating partially with some photography societies) and Egypt (depending almost entirely on using the education program for spreading the contest).
- Social networks: social networks are another possible strategy to bring participants. This was the main and almost sole strategy used for running WLM in Syria; the results were amazing. The best thing about social networks maybe how deep you can interact with people, so using those sites and creating some online groups, we could get participants to know each other and interact as individuals, becoming a whole community that works for feeding the competition.
- 'Old guardians': after everything, the "old guardians" remains the traditional and most important part in running WLM. No matter how many participants there's, the old guardians most always make the vast majority of photos. Those people have adopted the competition as an essential part of their life, so they are willing to pay for it from their time, energy, and even resources if needed. And they remains the most amazing thing about the competition. In the Arab world, Algeria & Tunisia had almost entirely depended on those few individuals to collect photos, while Jordan had also mostly depended on it, along with collaboration with institutions.
| Arab countries by photos number | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country | Uploaded photos | |||
| Syria | 1520 | |||
| Tunisia | 1490 | |||
| Jordan | 1377 | |||
| Algeria | 1048 | |||
| Egypt | 607 | |||
The box to the left shows at the end of contest, how many images did every country get. Of course, the quality and value of the photos vary, but generally this can be a good rough indicator. When combining these data with what was said above regarding advertisement strategies, we can see some general attributes; in Syria, the social networks had proven to be an amazing platform for bringing participants, on the other hand, the experience of Jordan & Egypt shows that institutions can't be considered as an ideal or even a good quality partners. In the end, the old guardians always remains the critical part in the contest, it seems that we should always expect the vast majority of photos to come from them, and all other strategies are only "for support". However, the experience of Syria this year proves that social networks are another quite successful strategy, actually, strangers from Facebook could bring to Syria photos more than any other country in the region. It's still possible to have some other activities, like photo-walks and similar public activities, however, considering the experiences of the region and other countries, those doesn't seems to be more than a little further support for the contest, they gonna require resources & energies much more than what could they give in return.
Those results have great implementations that would be a great help in planning better strategies for the future, I think there's a lot to be learned from them.