The rules—or "recommendations", as we prefer to call them—for last year were agreed on during the meeting in Berlin. The six most important were identified as follow:
All photos participating in the competition had to be self-taken and self-uploaded;
Upload was made possible in September only, both to Wikimedia Commons and an interim external website, e.g. Flickr or Google Picasa;
All eligible pictures had to have an identifier, given by the participants during upload;
Participants had to have their e-mail enabled on Wikimedia Commons (or the platform they uploaded their photos to) to be eligible for prizes;
Every country was able to nominate 10 pictures to the international stage of the competition.
We hope that at least some of those recommendations could be used in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, but as it is going to be much bigger than the two previous editions combined, there surely might be a need to adjust them to fit the future requirements of the contest. The final decision on the rules will be taken jointly by all people involved in organising WLM 2012 in the months to come.
What are the technical requirements for the pictures?
Due to the federal nature of the competition, there haven't been any general technical requirements for the pictures last year; all self-taken and self-uploaded photos that fulfilled the other basic rules (see above) and filled in the Wikimedia Commons scope were accepted into the contest, as the main goal of WLM 2011 was to collect as many pictures usable for Wikipedia as possible. Local organisers and local juries were able to define their precise requirements independently, and choose their winners accordingly.
It has been voiced by some members of the Wikimedia Commons community that many pictures uploaded for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 were of a bad quality. It would definitely be against the openness of the competition to set any technical requirements for the photos; however, there are already some ideas about how to help the participants improve the quality of their pictures, and the topic will surely be discussed in preparation for this years' contest.
