Wiki Loves Monuments 2011: the experience in Spain and reflections regarding the diffusion of cultural heritage

Digithum, no. 14 (May, 2012) | ISSN 1575-2275 A scientific e-journal published by the Arts and Humanities Department Abstract Wikipedia came into being in cyberspace. Its early years were marked by asynchronous work by users located all over the world who hardly ever related on a personal level outside the net. With time, some of the volunteers met at what were called wikimeetups, encounters initially aimed at tightening bonds which did not bring about any direct improvement to the project content. Face-to-face initiatives later took place that involved not just volunteers but also cultural entities. The most recent event and the one with the greatest impact was Wiki Loves Monuments 2011, a competition to photograph monuments in 18 European countries, including Spain. The high level of participation led to 160,000 photographs of monuments being taken, with Spain occupying the third place in terms of number of photographs. In this paper we explore the origins, implementation, development and results of Wiki Loves Monuments. The success of the 2011 edition and requests from other countries has led to organization of Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, which will be held at the global level.


Introduction
Wikipedia is shaped by content and by people. Supporting the encyclopaedia and sister projects is an active community of users who writes articles, oversees changes, promotes projects, resolves conflicts and maintains tools, with the aim of progressively improving quality and scope. Wikipedia came into being in cyberspace. Its early years were marked by asynchronous work by users located all over the world who hardly ever related on a personal level outside the net. This virtual community focused on a very specific task which it performed using a radically innovative horizontal cooperation mechanism. Maturation has led to the incorporation of an organizational and personal dimension, first through the constitution of the Wikimedia Foundation to support and foster projects and then through the organization of regular face-to-face meetings attended by editors of Wikimedia projects (Wikimedians). Some volunteers began to meet at meetups although the first edition of Wikimania was not held until 2005, as an annual conference designed to bring together the hundreds of participants in Wikimedia projects. An annual WikiSym symposium is now also held in which information on research into wikis is shared, with Wikipedia work occupying centre stage.
Initially the Wikimedian meetings had a social objective and were attended by people who had worked together on projects but who had never met. Although these encounters may have strengthened ties between members of the community, they did nothing to directly improve project content. Gradually, however, activities that combine both objectives have taken shape.
In addition to the free encyclopaedia, an enormously vital resource in the form of an images and media bank called Wikimedia Commons was brought about. 1 Created in 2004, this multimedia repository had, by March 2012, more than 12 million files donated by volunteers and, increasingly, by cultural institutions under a free licence. Other projects exists that make vast amounts of free multimedia material available, such as the Geograph Britain and Ireland project, 2 which has 2.8 million photographs, and Flickr, with over 51 million photographs (or 215 million if all the possible Creative Commons licences are included). 3 Since it was centralized for all Wikimedia projects, Commons growth became steady, with ongoing improvements in quality and diversity, applying the policies of collaboration and reuse.

The Wikimedia Commons image bank
While Wikimedia Commons covers all kinds of media, this paper will refer only to images and, in particular, photographs. Embedded images need to be selected for their informational value in supplementing encyclopaedia articles. Wikimedia uses the adjective educational to differentiate its bank from other social image banks: images must have a value in terms of "providing knowledge; [being] instructional or informative". 4 Illustration is not just a complement for the main textual information. An image itself conveys information, reinforces explanations and improves the overall readability of any text. However, there are limitations in terms of potential reuse, as most images are protected by copyright, unlike properly cited literature sources, which, in summarized form, can be used to create articles (Saorín; Pastor-Sánchez, 2011).

Wiki Loves Monuments 2011: experiència a Espanya i reflexions des de la difusió del patrimoni cultural
Wikipedia Commons is not like other collaborative digital image archives, since most have or potentially have concrete illustrative purposes. Wikipedia Commons content can also be used in any other context, digital or otherwise, under the same kind of free licence. It is a resource bank for both Wikimedia projects and any other social, editorial or commercial communication project.
Wikimedia Commons has a very careful policy regarding the use of images. It only accepts free content. The images are stored and organized on Wikimedia Foundation servers and can then be used for Wikipedia articles or other Wikimedia projects. Unlike Wikipedia, Commons is a centralized and multilingual resource that involves users in many languages. Initially, each Wikipedia had its local repository of images, but as the encyclopaedic project became more mature, the need to combine all graphic resources became clear, given their universal value. Even so, however, many editions of Wikipedia still allow images to be uploaded locally.

Wikipedia and cultural institutions
Although Wikipedia is written and constructed as a social initiative, public and private social bodies can also directly and indirectly contribute. Wikipedia may exist in digital space, but it is not independent of the social infrastructure that supports its editors and readers. The need for involvement in Wikipedia to impregnate cultural sectors is increasingly becoming apparent. As Antonio Lafuente (2011) pointed out, all studies on the development of free software have demonstrated "the importance of certain public or private organizational structures in the sustainability of projects and also show how Wikipedia would be impossible without the existence of public libraries, universities and museums".
Institutions are slowly beginning to become aware that they can better fulfil their social function by dedicating a portion of their resources to building the digital commons -of which Wikipedia is one of the most outstanding examples. Librarians, researchers, museum curators, heritage experts and educators are being called on to change the knowledge diffusion model, not only as citizens but also as agents commissioned with a social mission regarding education and culture transmission. Institutions, taking their conflict of interest policies into account, could each develop a model of participation adapted to their resources and interests. Wikimedia Outreach compiles and evaluates best practices in order to expand the scope of the Wikipedia project by working within the real-world cultural ecosystem.
One such activity is called GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). In a broader sense, also including science museums, interpretation centres, public broadcasters, etc. The GLAM-Wiki conference of 2009 developed a set of recommendations for collaboration between Wikipedia and cultural institutions, aimed at addressing the gap between concepts regarding cultural institutions and open culture. The recommendations covered aspects such as project financing, moral and reproduction rights and technologies, and also incorporated assessment of degree of access as an indicator of public culture policies.
An example is that of the Wikipedians in residence (for example, at the British Museum or the Museu Picasso), commissioned with the task of improving articles referring to institutions. Several meetings have been held in Spain (all in Catalonia) to promote cooperation between Wikipedians and cultural institutions. The first was a GLAM-Wiki meeting held in Barcelona in March 2011, when Wikimedia volunteers met with representatives of Museu Picasso, MACBA, Creative Commons Spain and patrimoni.gencat. 5 Other meetings have been held in cities like Lleida and Girona, and there also have been collaborations with institutions such as the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona.
Cultural institutions committed to the free dissemination and use of information have added valuable collections to Wikimedia Commons. The label "Commons partnership" is applied to organizations that have made material contributions. One major example of the release of photographic and visual heritage material is the State Library of Queensland's provision of 50,000 images and their metadata.
Recent years have witnessed initiatives in which Wikimedians are given a visible identity (Wikipedia Multimedia Events), 6 which, as well as increase content, seek to highlight the work of volunteers for mainstream institutions and the media and to strengthen community ties. Experiences in collaboration with museums and other initiatives such as Wiki Loves Art are evidence of this. 7 The latest initiative and the one with the greatest impact to date is the subject of this article:  11 Discussion focused on expanding the competition to other European countries, potential problems, the participation of the Wikipedian and photographer communities (Flickr, Panoramio) and the role of the Wikimedia chapters in contest organization. Underlined was the need for the chapters to act as intermediaries between the communities and the cultural institutions and also the need to provide appropriate software tools that facilitated file uploads. Another coordination meeting was held in Berlin from 13 to 15 May, where it was agreed to create upload wizards, locate possible sponsors at the European level and develop judging criteria. 12 The 2011 edition was held in 18 countries: Germany, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, France, Hungary, Luxembourg, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, 13 Sweden and Switzerland. Each country nominated ten photographs to participate in the European phase of the competition (except Belgium and Luxembourg, which shared their nominations). A jury evaluated the material according to criteria of quality, originality and usefulness of the image to Wikipedia and then selected a winning photograph and eleven finalists. The winning photograph in 2011 showed Chiajna monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest. A Spanish entry showing stables in the castle of Sant Ferran in Figueres (Girona) was among the runnerup photographs. 14 Europeana, the European open-access digital library, awarded a special prize for the best Art Nouveau photograph; the winning photo, chosen by voting through Flickr, showed the inside of the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. 15 There was also a prize for the best photograph from the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion, formed by the Spanish regions of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands and the French regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées; the jury selected five photographs of Languedoc-Rousillon, three of Catalonia and two of Midi-Pyrénées and chosen as the winner was the church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges in Collioure. 16 Also awarded was a prize for the best video, which showed a wallpaper printing machine from 1877 (the first to use 26 colours), as displayed in the old Leroy factory in Saint-Fargeau-Ponthierry (France). 17

Wiki Loves Monuments Spain 2011
In Spain there were two parallel events: Wikimedia Spain organized a competition for Spain and Amical Viquipèdia organized another for Catalan-speaking areas. 18 It was decided that the competition would centre on objects of cultural interest 19 in the monuments category, totalling more than 15,000 items.
Since most of the objects of cultural interest in Barcelona and Valencia had already been photographed, Wikipedia in Catalan included monuments listed in the regional inventories, namely, Cultural Assets of Local Interest for Catalonia and Buildings of Local Relevance for Valencia. These photographs would not be counted for the "Largest number of monuments photographed", prize in Spain.
Wikimedia project pages, a mailing list and virtual meetings were the means used to coordinate activities between Wikimedia Spain and Amical Viquipèdia. A number of Catalan volunteers also met in Barcelona in April 2011. To promote the competition, Amical Viquipèdia also organized an event called Viquipèdia Prem Barcelona. 20 Although the files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia was used to create the lists of monuments. Heritage projects were launched in the Spanish 21 and Catalan 22 versions of Wikipedia. A project on heritage was not created in Wikipedia in Galician, although a list of monuments in Galicia was drawn up. A WikiProject on heritage with a list of monuments in Aragon was also created in Wikipedia in Aragonese, 23 although the Aragonese volunteers were not involved in organizing the competition. Initially it was intended to draw up lists of monuments by provinces in Wikimedia Commons, so as to bring all users together regardless of language; ultimately, however, the work was done via the different language versions of Wikipedia, where visibility was higher.
One of the requirements for creating tables and subsequently processing databases was that each monument would have a unique identifier. The Spanish Wikipedia lists were created from data available from the website of the Ministry of Culture. 24 The Catalan Wikipedia lists were based on data from the regional administrations of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencia. All the lists were improved and corrected by volunteers, who included already available photographs for monuments and data on geographical coordinates, location, etc. Since the data were not error-free, error logs were created in both Catalan 25 and Spanish. 26 A problem was encountered in that the online Ministry of Culture list was not up-to-date. This was because the authority for declaring assets as of cultural interest had been transfered to the regions, even though these properties should, in any case, be included in the General Register of Properties of Cultural Interest of the Sub -Directorate General for the Protection of Historical Heritage. The information provided by the different regional administrations was therefore rather uneven.
This difficulty was aggravated by the fact that the identification codes used by the regional administrations are very different and the fact that some regional portals do not even list these codes (a fundamental identification requirement for the competition). This was further compounded by the complexity of identifying generically declared properties of cultural interest, which in many cases were not assigned any code. This was the case of castles and defensive works, protected by a decree dated 22 April 1949; badges, emblems, heraldic stones, pillory stones, boundary crosses and similar items of historical interest, protected by Decree 571/1963; granaries of Asturias and Galicia, protected by Decree 499/1973; and megalithic monuments, prehistoric caves and other prehistoric remains on the islands of Mallorca and Menorca, protected by Decree 2563/1966. For these reasons, most of the lists only feature properties that appear on the Ministry of Culture website, in the expectation of being able to obtain further data for future editions.
Flickr was also used for file uploads; two groups were created, one for Spain called Wiki Loves Wikimedia Monuments 2011 Spain 27 and another for Viquipèdia Amical called Wiki Loves Monuments CAT. 28 Of the ten selected photographs for Spain, four were uploaded to Flickr directly and not to Wikimedia Commons. The Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia decided to include some of the photographs uploaded to its architectural heritage inventory. 29 To assist in locating the monuments, a map was prepared that geotagged monuments for which coordinates were available (around 50% of the total). 30 This tool proved very useful, as participants were able to locate nearby monuments for photographing and to plan routes to visit as many monuments as possible. Figure 1 shows an early screenshot for the area of Madrid, with the red dots indicating monuments for which images are available and the white dots indicating monuments without images. The map was updated daily and by the time the competition was over, the number of monuments with images had grown considerably. Even so, despite the high participation level (to be discussed in the results section) and given the number of architectural heritage items, coverage for the rest of the country was uneven; images were available for only just over 30% of the monuments, leaving a great deal of work for future issues.
The Town Council of Plasencia (Cáceres) provided a venue for the awards ceremony and nominated one of the jurors. In the absence of financial support, the competition costs were borne by Wikimedia Spain with a contribution from Wikimedia Nederland. All the information was centralized in a site specifically created for the purpose. 31 The Spanish jury, which consisted of three members, published its decision on 1 November. 32 The awards were presented on 5 November at the old Convento de las Claras in Plasencia. The winning photograph showed the baths of Doña Maria Padilla in the Alcazar of Seville. Amical Viquipèdia presented the awards for Catalonia on 24 November at the Palacio Moja in Barcelona; the winning photograph show the Torre de Sant Joan in Amposta.

File uploading
Historically, file uploading for Wikimedia projects has been a problem for inexperienced users, 33 making the usability of Wikimedia Commons problematic. To address this problem, an improved upload form was prepared, with a custom configuration for the event. 34 The photographs had to be the person's own work, had to be published under a free licence compatible with Wikimedia Commons (recommended was Creative Commons Attribution-

Results
Results for the Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 experiment were analysed from a dataset 36 created from all the relevant data for the uploaded images. This dataset contains several fields, among them, image name, author, date created, date uploaded, file size in bytes, width and height in pixels, the corresponding monument (if indicated on uploading) and country. The Wikimedia Commons MediaWiki API was used to build the dataset 37 for the "Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2011" 38 category containing all the images for the competition. The creation of this dataset and its release under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence (metadata) and GPLv3 (code) allows anyone to reproduce the results or conduct their own analysis. Although some users uploaded images just a few hours before judging began or after it ended, the analysis was restricted to the month of September, as originally planned. 39 It also excluded the images uploaded through Flickr, whose transfer to Wikimedia Commons took place later. 40 Between 00:00:00 UTC on 1 September 2011 and 23:59:59 UTC on 30 September 2011, 5,347 users uploaded 163,251 files, accounting total for 448,307 megabytes, (more than 437 gigabytes) to Wikimedia Commons for the Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 event. Just for comparative purposes, the largest ever photography competition in the world to date, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, handled a total of 126,501 images. 41 Uploads over the month can be seen in Figure 2. Participation on a daily basis was very steady (no day had fewer than 1,500 uploads) and the average was 5,400 files a day; in the last three days, uploads exceeded 10,000 images a day, with 22,000 images uploaded on day 30.
As regards participation by country, Spain ranked third with 16,708 images (10.2% of the total). Figure 3 shows how some countries carried more weight in the competition; for example, the top four countries (Germany, France, Spain and Poland) together accounted for over 50% of all the files.
The purpose of the event was to photograph as many monuments in the participating countries as possible so as to create photographic material to illustrate Wikipedia articles. Using GLAMorous, 42 a tool designed to calculate the use of Wikimedia Commons images in Wikimedia projects, it was possible to determine that 40,000 images (just over 20%) from the category "Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2011" and 2,387 images (13%) from the category "Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 Spain" are already being used in some language edition of Wikipedia. The percentages may seem low, but (at the time of writing) only five months have passed since the end of the competition; furthermore, an article about the monument first needs to exist and that implies a longer-term project. There are also monuments with a large number of photographs that cannot all be shown, although they can be retained as an extra resource.
Although more than 52,000 images (around a third of the total) as yet have no monument identifier code (identification is a task still being completed by volunteers), if we consider those that do contain this metadata (around 111,000 images), over 36,000 photographs have been taken of monuments in Europe and around 3,600 of monuments in Spain. The most photographed monument, with more than 400 images, was the Abbey of Sainte-Foy 43 (code PA00093999), located in Conques (France). The most photographed monuments in Spain were the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Tarragona Cathedral and the Cathedral of Cordoba (a former mosque), with more than 100 photographs each. 44 Looking at the distribution of images by regions, 45 Figure  4 shows that participation was greatest in Catalonia, which accounted for more than 45% of the images.
The image upload rate by country throughout the month of September is depicted in Figure 5. By day 9, the country with the highest number of pictures was Germany. Spain, Poland and Portugal had a similar number of uploaded images, but Spain was eventually placed third after Germany and France. Hungary was a special case, as participation commenced on 21 September, therefore the completion date for the local competition extended until 21 October. By late October, 5,043 images for Hungary had been uploaded. Note, however, that comparisons between countries are not realistic given the fact that population and user community sizes differ for each of the countries.
A survey was conducted after the competition. Responses were mostly positive, but noted the need to improve the uploading to that of sites like Flickr and difficulties to locate monument identification codes. The main reasons for participating in the competition were the interest in collaborating with free-culture projects, the prizes and the fact that photographs would be viewed and used by thousands of Internet users.
Media coverage of the event varied considerably from one country to another. Wikimedia Russia organized an exhibition of the 37 best photographs, using the QRpedia system to link to Wikipedia articles on the monuments from mobile phones. 46 In Poland, the competition, which went by the name Wiki Zabytki Lubi, was nominated for the Historical Event of 2011 plebiscite organized by the Museum of Polish History and the site Historia.org.pl. 47

Conclusions and the future
We have described the Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 experience, in which 18 European countries, including Spain, participated. This edition was held in response to the favourable reception given to the 2010 edition in the Netherlands and also to the growing interest in Wikimedia community-based cultural initiatives and activities, aimed at expanding not just text but also multimedia content.
The outcome has been more than satisfactory, as indicated by the more than 160,000 images uploaded by participants. For Spain, more than 16,000 photographs of some 3,600 monuments were uploaded, representing 10.2% of the total. The success of the 2011 edition and requests from other countries has led to the organizers to begin work on a worldwide Wiki Loves Monuments for 2012. Iberocoop, which coordinates Spanish and South American Wikimedia chapters, is organizing a working group, participated in by ten countries, which will organize the competition in Latin America and which will also provide legal advice in countries, like Argentina, where legislation regarding freedom of panorama and free licences is ambiguous.
The outcome of this initiative in terms of the dissemination of heritage is undeniable, to which can be added the preservation in images of monuments that may be damaged or destroyed. Recent  cultural institutions, which, with their technical means, can publicize projects and encourage participation by offering awards. Finally, Wiki Loves Monuments demonstrates that there are alternative strategies for developing knowledge and for documenting our common cultural heritage. The growing influence of such initiatives on European cultural and digital policies is evident. 48 The enormous advantages of working with licences that are as open as possible and that allow data and content to be reused is becoming increasingly understood, as it makes our heritage truly available to us as digital citizens.

Emilio José Rodríguez Posada
Computer Engineering Bachelor degree and predoctoral student (University of Cadiz) emiliojose.rodriguez@uca.es He has been awarded grants by the Free Software and Open Knowledge Office of the University of Cadiz, has helped organize several free software seminars and has given talks and workshops on Wikipedia at the University of Cadiz. He has been an editor of Wikimedia projects since 2005 and has developed free software for wikis such as the anti-vandalism bot AVBOT (winner of the 3rd University Free Software Competition in the Best Community Project category) and the StatMediaWiki and WikiEvidens applications to generate statistics and to view these communities online. He recently founded the WikiTeam project which has already preserved hundreds of wikis, and he has created the WikiPapers project to collect all the academic literature referring to this research field.