Submissions/Wikipedia Photography Club and Wiki Photographer

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

223

Title of the submission: Wikipedia Photography Club and Wiki Photographer

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: Nasir Khan Saikat

E-mail address: nasir8891gmail.com

Username: nasir8891

Country of origin: Bangladesh

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Wikimedia Bangladesh, Executive Committee member

Personal homepage or blog: http://nasir8891.wordpress.com

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikipedia hosts and encourages events which is related to photography, for example GLAM, Wiki loves monuments and so on. A good number of new volunteers join these projects. But it is not possible to join in any time of the year or if my country is not hosting any of these events. And Wiki loves monuments is a contest so we are not sure if these new volunteers will continue with the Wikipedia or not.

Wikipedia Photography Club will be a platform for a group of volunteers who have interest in photography. It dose not indicate for joining this group you have to have expensive photography gadgets or a deep knowledge of photography. It is open for every one but it should be confirmed that s/he is not against photography. Establishing a local photography club creates a port for those who wants to contribute to the Wikipedia and might not be interested in article editing.

Wikipedia is mainly targeted for the text and images/media files are a part of it and at the same time we can not ignore these too. The problem is in most of the workshops, discussions and other outreach events are focused on article writing. And most of the cases it is very hard to find that there is a chance to contribute images/media files to Wikipedia. A complete article does not contain texts only and we use some cleanup tag to request new and improve the quality of the images. So a place should be created where interested photographers can join and discuss. And these group of people can lead the Wiki events which are closely related to photography. We can edit the articles at the middle of the night but in most of the cases it is not feasible to go to take photographs at that time. So the event and planning for these two type of volunteers might not be similar.

Commons maintain a regular process of selecting quality and valuable images but we do not publish this information that much. But it is a good opportunity to campaign on this. In Wikipedia many of the articles lacks good images we can collect the photos via this process.

Most of the cases we request images for the articles but if a club exists then we can organize more frequently. There is a chance to get new images and based on this we can create new articles. Recently i have observed that a large number of people are capturing and sharing good images of different places of Bangladesh. We can use these photos for the articles of Wikipedia. But there are some problems regarding the license. I have a proposal regarding this issue.

For last few years i am involved with the Wiki Community of Bangladesh. I have conducted many workshops for different type of peoples of the community. Blogging is very popular here so we organized several workshps for the bloggers to encourage them to become Wikipedia volunteer. But success rate was very poor. Some of them let us know that there are some reasons that they are not interested in wiki, like they can not push their own POV, they can not comment on others, at the main page their name is not mentioned, there is no ranking available for the users (available in the forums, users posts more to up their ranking). I found a common pattern of these requests is the users wants something in return of their contribution. None of the requests can be accepted for the articles of the Wikipedia, At least to get a chance to show that what areas they are good at.but most of these can be incorporated for the photographers.

Wiki Photographers will be those who contributes photos to Wikipedia regularly and at least 15 photos has been used in different articles of Wikipedia. It will be an on wiki appreciation system, and users can publish this to the social networking sites. For example at the Facebook or Google Plus they can add that they are Working as a Wiki Photographer at Wikipedia. The more photo is used the user will get more points/Barnstars. And again they will share this news to their social circle and others will be interested to get and share the Barnstars. Even we can call the members of the Wikipedia Photography Club as Wiki Photographer. We can contact the other local photography clubs(like the university photography clubs) to join and/or we can join at the events that they are organizing to get involved with more people.

I believe that along with this there are more ways and chances to extend this idea. As the process has not been started yet, so it might need to study a little more to lineup the project. I have applied for a fellowship on this idea, you will get more information and perspectives of the idea at the fellowships project idea and its talk page.

Track

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
Outreach and extend the community

Length of presentation/talk: 25 Minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

It depends on getting the scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

After the confirmation, the slide will be uploaded.

Special request as to time of presentations

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

--Lpagola (talk) 17:32, 17 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As a photographer in training. CT Cooper · talk 20:12, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As a devoted commonist. --PierreSelim (talk) 16:09, 6 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Add your username here.