I agree with Mike that we should be recognising quality, and I agree with the others that focusing attention on specific gaps (as long as they're broad enough to interest enough people) is likely to yield better results than a "go out and take photos of whatever" approach.

Not quite within the scope of WLM, but it would be nice to get people to upload/release images relating to historical events. For example, there must be someone out there with photos of the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, or of the SAS storming the Iranian embassy, or even of the London bombings in 2005 (ie something more than a mobile phone photo taken in a tunnel and a photo of a queue of emergency vehicles). Images of notable events actually taking place (as opposed to, say, a picture of the burnt-out Iranian embassy after the siege) is an area where we struggle I think, and one of the few areas where commercial media out-do us.

Harry   

From: Michael Peel <michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk>
To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 14:01
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Making Wikipedia loves monuments work in the UK.

Don't forget that whilst we have photos of a lot of things, we don't necessarily have *good* photos of them. In particular, Geograph consists mostly of low-resolution (and often low-quality) images. We could/should be encouraging people to share higher quality photos with Commons as well as covering subject gaps (e.g. by rewarding quality rather than quantity).

Thanks,
Mike

On 23 Jan 2012, at 12:42, WereSpielChequers wrote:

> In suggesting things like war memorials I'm not trying to restrict people, but I would like to point them to our gaps. It should be easy for anyone to work out whether we have photographs of the churches, libraries, statues, war memorials, blue plaques, pubs and hospitals in their patch, and a fill in the gaps project would in my view be well worthwhile. I think that it is much more positive for our current and future photographers to acknowledge that we already have a couple of million images in the UK and our aim is to make that more comprehensive.
>
> Of course those who are willing to look up lists rather than just look at the images that we already have would be welcome to complete our collections of listed buildings and Ancient monuments. ut for Wiki Loves Monuments I think we need to make things easy and at the same time interesting. The Geograph really does have images of a fallen fence post with the description "most interesting thing in this grid square". I think we could and should do a WLM contest that asks people to fill in interesting gaps, and caters for pretty much whatever interests our photographers.
>
> A photo of every gravestone in every cemetery would certainly be of interest to the amateur genealogists, but we need to remember that not every volunteer would share their enthusiasm - I've categorised a fair few Geograph images and apart from notable people like Darwin, Monty and Captain Bligh the bulk of the cemetery shots don't give detail on inscriptions. But following on from Charles Matthes point, maybe what we should be doing is outreach to these various cemetery societies and offering them a home on the web for their images.
>
> WereSpielChequers
>
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