Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Results and best practices

This page gives a description of how Wiki Loves Africa 2022 was organised, the outcomes, and some of the important lessons we drew.

See also

• Results and best practices 2014
• Results and best practices 2015
• Results and best practices 2016
• Results and best practices 2017
• Results and best practices 2019
• Results and best practices 2020
• Results and best practices 2021
• Results and best practices 2022
• Results and best practices 2023

Introduction

Wiki Loves Africa - the 8th iteration - was held from 15th February until 30th April 2022. The initial dates of the contest were decided on by the Wiki Loves Africa organizers community via a poll on Telegram. The theme was chosen as Home+Habitat following a feedback offered on the m:Wiki Loves Africa 2021/Survey.

This year, 32 communities officially took part in preparing 37 events and creating local noise around the contest. As usual, the media competition accepted entries from across Africa, and from people beyond Africa, as long as the images represented African-related material or content.

Main links

• Commons portal : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa
• Meta portal (for organizers) : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Africa_2022
• Website : http://www.wikilovesafrica.net
• Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/wikilovesafrica/
• Instagram handle : https://www.instagram.com/wikilovesafrica
• Twitter handle : https://twitter.com/wikilovesafrica
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvyE0yEt-BKgEUM5QlcQOwsMtpbWCbsnA
• Telegram : https://t.me/joinchat/FI9fz0pnPNiWbyyLr-YsFQ
• Mailing list : https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/african-wikimedians.lists.wikimedia.org/

Output
The contest resulted in 16,064 media files, per Category:Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2022 submitted by 1111 competitors in 53 countries. 72% of those competitors were new to Commons. The images have since been viewed 1,309,020 by December 2022 across 228 Wikimedia sites. Current usage of the images stands at 5.64% with 906 distinct images used. (12.2022).

The National winners were chose and announced by local teams. The international winners were announced around in September 2022.

Collaboration
Due to the use of our Telegram group over (formerly used) Facebook group or email, there was a lot more engagement from the local organizers. This meant decisions were taken quickly, new members onboarded more rapidly and by more old-timers; but it was also way more pleasant!

Anecdote : As usual. the International team readily supported Local organizers and had their challenges resolved rapidly too. One instance was when User:CapitainAfrika who was the local organizer for Wikimedians of Democratic Republic of Congo User Group, approached our Wiki Loves Africa Admin User:Ceslause on telegram, with a problem of not being able to set up Montage for his community's local jury process. User:Ceslause seized the opportunity to teach User:CapitainAfrika how the Montage platform works, which User:CapitainAfrika went ahead to teach User:Adoscam, the local jury coordinator for Wikimédiens du Bénin User Group. User:Ceslause also went ahead to teach local organizer for Wikimedia South Africa, User:Mchuchushupai how the Montage platform works, which she used for the chapter's Wiki Loves Africa 2022 local jury process.

Organizers, credits, and collaboration

Wiki Loves Africa is organized by m:Wiki in Africa, in collaboration with most African based UserGroups. Most groups are funded by Wikimedia Foundation. In 2022, 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.

More about organizers and roles

Roles of WIA and UserGroups 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.

Credits

Credits 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

More about collaboration

2022 Survey results 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 the impact on the local teams collect their feedback and 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.

Impact

Immediate impact of the Wiki Loves Africa 2022

The contest resulted in 16,064 media files, per Category:Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2022 submitted by 1111 competitors in 53 countries. 72% of those competitors were new to Commons. The images have since been viewed 1,309,020 by December 2022 across 228 Wikimedia sites. Current usage of the images stands at 5.64% with 906 distinct images used. (12.2022).

Other stats include:

• Participating Communities: 32
• In-person events: 37
• Online meetings and webinars were organized including (but not limited to):
  • Weekly office hours alternating English and French held every Saturday morning
  • 2 webinars to assist increasing entrants’ understanding of the competition and
  • 2 meetings with organizers of local events in order to clarify issues and concerns, discuss challenges and confirm expectations.
  • 2 training webinars about translation
  • 2 training webinars about Image Clean-Up
  • 2 training webinars about Communication
  • 2 Webinar to provide guide for jury process
  • A certain number of Community hours for WLA French community
  • A certain number of WLA English community

Full statistics for the life-span of the Wiki Loves Africa contest can be found in the table below: Wiki Loves Africa images have collectively - since metrics began in 2016 - been viewed 1 billion times.

Statistics of the Wiki Loves Africa Contest

Year of competition	Images entered	People contributed	Monthly page views 06/21	Countries participating	Total page views: 06/21	Months tracked	Percentage useage (06/21)	Uploaders registered after competition start	% Uploaders registered after competition start
2014	5,868	873	3,807,278	47	216,721,827	65	20	735	83
2015	7,352	722	3,209,078	48	216,569,252	65	13	585	80
2016	7,768	836	3,258,412	49	144,350,754	65	15	682	80
2017	17,874	2,435	5,879,895	55	255,586,509	45	11	2,307	88
2019	8,212	1,350	2,602,510	53	74,239,940	38	13	1,157	85
2020	16,982	1,904	4,638,105	53	115,951,946	25	21	1,448	76
2021	8,319	1,149	1,471,494	47	20,411,927	15	11	884	76
2022	16,265	1,111	205,556	53	658,517	1	5.64	850	72
Totals	88,640	10,380	25,072,328	50.63	1,044,490,672	-	14.4	8,648	80

More historical stats available here : c:Category:Wiki Loves Africa Stats

Continued impact of the Wiki Loves Africa project

Since 2014, the Wiki Loves Africa project has achieved the following things:

• Over 88,640 images have been entered by 10,380 competitors from up to 55 countries under a free licence (CC-BY-SA) ;
• The images entered to Wiki Loves Africa are viewed nearly 25,072,328 million times each month (June 2022)
• Wiki Loves Africa’s images from the first 8 years have been viewed over 1,044,490,672 (1 billion) times altogether (June 2022)
• 32 Wikimedia communities from 26 African countries have hosted participation events, information sessions and training workshops; this year, the Haitian community was involved
• at least 337 participation and training events have been held by participating communities between 2014 and 2022.
• The competition attracts high levels of new contributors to the Wikimedia projects – an average of 80% of participants being newbies;
• A Wiki Loves Africa prize-winning image was included in the Journeys Through Our Fragile Heritage exhibition at the UNESCO headquarters, Paris, and
• Wiki Loves Africa’s ISA tool was the winner of the WikiData Award for Best Multimedia Tool in November 2019.
• Mohamed Hozyen, a prize winner for Wiki Loves Africa 2019 was been selected for the AFAC - The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Prins Claus Fonds and Magnum Foundation Arab Documentary Photography Programme
• A Wiki Loves Africa image Firefighter, Ashton Bay, March 2017 submitted by South African photographer user:StevenTerblanche for the Wiki Loves Africa 2017 contest under the theme of People at Work.The stunning image was selected for 3rd position for the Picture of the Year 2021 award. The image, depicting a courageous firefighter battling against a veld-fire at Ashton Bay, Jeffreys Bay, Eastern Cape Province, Republic of South Africa, was one of 17,874 images submitted by 2,435 photographers, the image has finally received the recognition it deserves.
• A second Wiki Loves Africa image, submitted in the 2020 competition, was also in the Top 5 selection for the Picture of the Year 2021 award. . This beautiful monochrome image shot by Egyptian photographer User:Eman arab is of A boy wearing a protective mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt. It was submitted to Wiki Loves Africa’s 2021 competition which focused on Health + Wellness.

Telling the story

• A Wiki Loves Africa image Firefighter, Ashton Bay, March 2017 submitted by South African photographer user:StevenTerblanche for the Wiki Loves Africa 2017 contest under the theme of People at Work.The stunning image was selected for 3rd position for the Picture of the Year 2021 award. The image, depicting a courageous firefighter battling against a veld-fire at Ashton Bay, Jeffreys Bay, Eastern Cape Province, Republic of South Africa, was one of 17,874 images submitted by 2,435 photographers, the image has finally received the recognition it deserves.

• A second Wiki Loves Africa image, submitted in the 2020 competition, was also in the Top 5 selection for the Picture of the Year 2021 award. . This beautiful monochrome image shot by Egyptian photographer User:Eman arab is of A boy wearing a protective mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt. It was submitted to Wiki Loves Africa’s 2021 competition which focused on Health + Wellness.

• Through Wiki Loves Africa 2022 ISA campaign, we were able to come up with depiction guidelines for adding meta data to images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Depiction_guidelines. This has tackled any form of cheating on ISA campaigns, and could help the community at large to stick to best practices on image depiction.

New Elements

Being our 8th year, the competition team is well versed in the process of putting the competition together. However, every year is the opportunity to challenge our previous processes and operations. Here is a list of new elements for this year!

Updated and enhanced Organizers portal on Meta

All pages of the meta portal were somewhat updated. We might in particular want to highlight:

• How to join
• Participating communities including links to their grants and information such as lead person, and competition pages.
• Tools section that lists a complete compendium of all the tools used to build the competition, thereby assisting future competition organizers
• A template style for improved navigation : m:Template:Wiki Loves Africa/style.css

Improved The Wiki Loves Africa 2022 competition page on Commons

It includes:

• A more prominent ‘entries’ button
• Updated Rules
• (NEW) Country pages (such as Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022 in Cameroon)
• (NEW) Tracking of events (Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Countries)

A new promotional video

• A new video created in English by User:Islahaddow, translated into French by User:Ceslause, translated into Portuguese by User:UzochiAbundance and into Arabic by User:Bachounda as a call for entries.

• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Home and Habitat in English
• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Home and Habitat in French
• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Home and Habitat in Arabic
• Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Home and Habitat in Portuguese

Improved Wiki Loves Africa website

• The Wiki Loves Africa website updated with 2022 information and more detail on basic photography tips [1]

More meetings and training webinars

• Communication 101 webinars (English)
• Translation 101 webinars (English and French)
• Image clean-up webinars (English and French)
• Regular office Hours (English and French)

Training material and webinars

A upload wizard tutorial video

Wiki Loves Africa is a first entry space for most photographers to the Wikimedia Projects - on average, 82% of competitors are brand new to the Wikimedia projects. The 2022 focus for WIA had been how to ensure clear pathways for people to access the Wikimedia projects further and to build their digital skills and knowledge. In 2022, we proceeded further on this path with webinars dedicated to metadata usage and correct categories, descriptions and image depictions and page translations. With this in mind, 2022 became about acknowledging and developing clear instructions, guidelines and pathways of entry for organizers and new competitors alike. We also continued working on the topic of qualification of WLA images related to labels available on Commons (aka, featured images, quality images, valued images) to get more WLA images qualified.

• Quality Issues on meta
• Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2020/Images checking
• Commons:Wiki Loves Africa/WLA images under evaluation
• Latest webinars :m:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Meetings

We currently have :

• The upload wizard tutorial made in English to assist new contributors and walk them through what to expect from the Wiki Loves Africa Upload Wizard.
• Additional materials, including the webinars, can be found at this link to the category: c:Category:Wiki Loves Africa training material
  • or here Wiki Loves Africa 2021 "IP and licences" webinar
  • or there Wiki Loves Africa 2021 "How to make an image useful" webinar
• Entirely new tips section on the website providing vital photographic framing knowledge

Off wikis communications

Wiki Loves Africa is an opportunity to do outreach, in hope of recruitment of new participants to Wikimedia Projects. As a consequence, a lot of effort is being put into designing communication material, translating messages (into French and Portuguese) and running communication campaigns every year. Social media such as Facebook, twitter and Instagram are the primary means of communication and proved successful to provide visibility.

More about Communication

Communications materials 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 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. Marketing Materials developed for Wiki Loves Africa 2022 These are .jpeg files below, but the .pdf versions can be found in Wiki Loves Africa 2022 Communications category, on Commons. Talk about the 2022 Contest Consult this page for more information about Messaging and Talking to the Press about Wiki Loves Africa.

International jury process

The Jury process was headed up by Isla Haddow-Flood with assistance from Ceslause, Ciell and User:Slaporte on the Montage team.
16,265 images were reviewed through the Wiki Loves Africa Jury process. The first round of review was done by 36 Commonists and Wikimedians. The subsequent rounds were reviewed by a jury of 12 members from Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, United Kingdom, Canada, Uganda, Netherlands and France. The jury comprised a mix of professional photographers and experience Commonists, from Africa and internationally. This was the first year that previous winners were also invited to be on the jury.

National jury process was managed independently by national teams willing to engage in a national selection process. Guidelines are proposed in a National Judging Charter to ensure uniform clarity, understanding and collective agreement as to the best and most ethical practices.

More about the jury process

National Jury process 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. International Jury process 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: 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. First Jury Round - first yes / no round for jury. Second Jury Round - rated round - 5 stars Third Jury Round - yes/no to select top 30 images Jury deliberation (Zoom) - Final discussion and selection among the jury members who could make it. 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 Lessons and comments 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.

Winners

The top 20 shortlist for Wiki Loves Africa competition under the 2022 theme, Home & Habitat.

National selection with prizes may be seen here: c:Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/National winners.

The international prizes were:

• 1st prize: US$2000
• 2nd prize: US$1500
• 3rd prize: US$1000

Additional categories were:

• Prize for best quality video (audio and visual quality and storytelling will be taken into account): $1000
• Special collection prize (A collection of photos telling a story on the theme): US$750

The quest for quality

It is very important to the team to make sure that Wiki Loves Africa pictures are of

• the best quality possible
• recognized for their quality
• reused in the other wikimedia projects

Several efforts were led in 2022 in that direction

1. Several online training webinars were proposed, in particular on the image clean-up process, in English and French
2. The database of photographers was improved and mailings were sent to invite them to join the contest
3. For the second year, we explicitly and thoroughly worked on ALL the images collected to make sure they were properly described, categorized etc. The coordination of that effort was done on Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Images checking, using multiples queries to identify problematic cases.
4. We organized the ISA drive during the WLA MetaData weeks (end of 2022) to improve the addition of structured data to the images
5. last, after the organisation of several meetings, we launched an initiative to get Wiki Loves Africa images be labelled Featured Images, or Quality Images, or Valued Images : WLA images under evaluation

Satellite activities

Wiki Loves Africa is not just a photography contest. It gave birth to a set of activities round the year and the team participate to related projects run by allies as well.

Amongst those, in 2022, we could mention

• m:Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2022 (WPWP). This 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. We actively participate every year, to make sure photos uploaded by the participants to Wiki Loves Africa actually get used on Wikipedia

• Commons:Wiki Loves Africa MetaData Weeks. 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.

• Participation to m:Image Description Week

Wiki Loves Africa participates in WPWP

More about WLA participation in WPWP

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. Outcome of the campaign 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

Wiki Loves Africa MetaData Weeks

More about WLA MetaData Weeks

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 Results Contributors: 48 Images worked on: 15,912 Total Contributions: 95,361 Final winner list User:Oby Ezeilo: 31,483 contributions User:Rwebogora: 20,759 contributions User:Abatagatifu: 13,260 contributions

Lessons and comments

Issues we faced last year and how we decided to deal with them

• Tracking and promoting local activities : It is really challenging collating the number of events that took place in each country at the local level. This has always been an issue, but it seems to have grown worse since the pandemic started. We decided to create an event log table on the "Local Events" column of the International page, to enable every organizer edit and update each event they hold in their country

 Done This has been implemented here Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Countries. It worked fairly well overall, though it was necessary to regularly remind local leads to update that page (or to provide the info so that this page would be updated).

• Country pages : We decided the creation of a template for a landing page for countries. All the participating country pages to shall be built on or even pre-create country pages (the teams will have the freedom to change the model of course)

 Done. This has been implemented. Many countries did their own page, most of them based on the proposed template. See for example : Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2022 in Cameroon.

• Online Promotion : Unfortunately, for yet poorly explained reasons, the Wiki Loves Africa Facebook account has been restricted from using paid promotions. The appeal did not result in any unlocking. It looks like we will have to go forward without paid advertisement on Facebook. We also need to expand the use of Instagram in 2022

 Done. We focused on organic Facebook publicity for the 2020 campaign activities

• Translation of contest pages and meta portal pages was seen insufficient.

 Done. We managed to get more translations this year, in particular following two webinars (French and English) explaining how to actually use the translation system ! This worked well and will be replicated next year. Still insufficient in Arabic.

• Training webinars and online meetings were considered very valuable and users asked for more ! We decided to continue and expand last year webinar sessions. Webinars and office hours have been organized in both English and French

 Done. See m:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/Meetings. Aside from regular Office Hours, we organized webinars around 1) Communication issues 2) Translation tools 3) Jury process 4) Image clean-up

The year, what worked well

• Webinars. To renew and expand
• Instagram : We increased the engagement on Instagram
• Adoption of country page template

What did not work so well

• In one country, the local team uploaded a LOT of images of limited quality, unfortunately favoring quantity over quality. This created tensions as it creates a huge workload for those involved in image clean-up, and for the jury. We mostly decided to have one to one conversations next year with the « rather new teams » to provide helpful suggestions.
• Whilst local teams generally embraced the new template system for country landing page, it has been difficult to get those updated (in particular with local events)
• Arabic translation of the pages (ongoing situation)
• Whilst we had many candidates, the jury first round was complicated as a) some volunteers did not start the selection process b) some started but did not finish c) some provided an invalid email address. This resulted in reallocation of images to select on a fewer set of people, making the process a bit heavy
• We had issues with Montage technical management (delays). The Montage tool environment is not sufficiently supported by operators.

What we'll do differently henceforth

Considering the reports of the general survey and the organizers' interview:

• We shall widen the scope of communication on the theme for Wiki Loves Africa 2023 for better interpretation
• We shall improve communications about the contest in languages other than English, like French/Arabic.
• We shall the scheduling the organizers' interviews during a more quiet period within the movement to avoid elements that could distract participation.

Tech notes

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?).