A few weeks ago, at the Amsterdam Hackaton, Lodewijk Gelauff (aka Effeietsanders) asked me to look into the Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) data and provide a list of images, who uploaded them, when, and for which country. Primary goal: to provide accurate data for the submission of the 2012 contest as Guinness World Record (world record currently held by WLM 2011), and was indeed a global event (WLM scope in 2010: The Netherlands, 2011: Europe, 2012: Earth). Once these data were extracted, an update on retention rates, and a breakdown per country for images and contributors would also be nice.
Retention rates
With cleaner data than half a year ago we did rerun editor retention numbers.
In Sep 2011 3,497 new users contributed to WLM. Out of these, 397 still contributed in Nov 2011 or later, on any Wikimedia wiki, thus leading to an awesome retention rate for WLM 2011 of 11.4% !!
In Sep 2012 10,825 new users contributed to WLM, in Oct another 412 (WLM Israel ended later). Out of these, 635 still contributed in Nov 2012 or later, on any Wikimedia wiki, thus leading to a retention rate for WLM 2012 of 5.7%. (it will grow, as did the number for 2011)
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Breakdown by country
Here are four charts that show the breakdown per country of contributors and uploads, either for the last year 2012, or in comparison with earlier years (see also notes below).
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WLM Contributors by Country, Comparison |
WLM Uploads by Country, Comparison |
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WLM Uploads by Country, Cumulative |
WLM Uploads by Country 2012 |
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Notes:
1) Country is about the monument, not the uploader. A person may have contributed images for several countries.
2) Please do not read too much in the chart showing cumulative uploads for three WLM contests, and particularly not %completed. Some countries may have more monuments than others, or have them more easily accessible (travel time). Some countries have a more active Wikimedia community than others. Some countries have fast internet, in which case uploading multiple images per monument is less of a burden.
Every WLM image in Wikimedia Commons is tagged with a template. This template specifies year and country. In a wiki environment there is always some data normalization to be done, as most of the data was added automatically but some image sets were hand-coded (or uploaded with custom scripts). So a couple of variations occurred. For instance: why specify country code ‘de’ if you can also specify ‘{{lc:DE}}’ 
So it took a few iterations to detect and fix the anomalies.
There are two raw data files: wlm_images_contributors.zip and wlm_retention.zip (sparingly documented). Let me know if you have questions.