Interested and participating countries 2012 (permanently updated)

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest around cultural heritage monuments in September. Starting from the Netherlands in 2010 and organized on a European level in 2011, we go global in 2012!

Everybody can participate and improve Wikipedia in their local and regional neigbourhood. Cultural heritage is everywhere around you, you just need to look and learn!

In every participating country you can win awards, and the best photos in each country continues to the international jury – which will select the best monument photos in 2012.

Make sure to keep track of this blog for more information, updates and glimpses how things are going in other countries!

posted 01-01-2012 by Lodewijk

Barbara Fischer

With an increasing number of participating countries for Wiki Loves Monuments this year (30 countries indicated their interest and counting!) we have an international coordination team of four Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 organizers. However, even with four volunteers we wouldn’t be able to keep a proper overview and give the countries the attention they deserve. Therefore, Wikimedia Deutschland has agreed to make the international Wiki Loves Monuments coordination support part of the tasks of their newly hired Cultural Partnerships Curator!

Barbara Fisher started a few days ago and is an experienced projectmanager and worked among other projects in PR for the Cultural Heritage Day Berlin. She explained us why she liked Wiki Loves Monuments so much:

You only see what you know. There are treasures to be found just in our neighborhood. Through Wiki Loves Monuments we all have the motivation to explore our surroundings and find out that the house we have passed by a million times is actually a monument. From that moment, I am sure, You will feel differently about this house. Through WLM you share that feeling with many other people all over the world. The assemble of stones gains a story and becomes worthwhile your care.

You will definitely hear more from her in the future – but her most important work will be behind the screens. Making all the wonderful volunteer organizers throughout the world more effective and efficient in their work!

posted 18-04-2012 by Lodewijk

As Wiki Loves Monuments goes global this year, and there are more and more countries joining the competition, the international facilitating group is trying to help new participants to kick-start preparations in their countries.

Following Lodewijk’s successful visit to the United Kingdom in February, Tomasz visited Ukraine and the Czech Republic on the weekend of March 23-24 with workshops explaining how to organise Wiki Loves Monuments.

9 people — including a Wikipedian who travelled from Minsk, Belarus — gathered on Saturday, March 24, in Kiev’s office of the Ukrainian Society for Historical and Cultural Heritage to take an active part in the workshops. Pictures from the meeting as well as an audio recording of the workshops are available on Wikimedia Commons; you can also have a look at the slides provided by Tomasz.

Here’s also a nice group photo of the participants:

The next day, Tomasz travelled to Brno, Czech Republic, to take part in a meeting of Czech Wikimedians, and to deliver very similar workshops for the Czech organisers of Wiki Loves Monuments 2012. More than 20 people took part in the meeting, and discussed current and upcoming activities of the Czech Wikipedia community, including this year’s edition of our contest.

We hope that these meetings would enable the Ukrainian and the Czech Wikimedia communities to prepare and take part in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012. If you feel that a brainstorming meeting in your country with one of us present would be helpful, too, please let us know, and we’ll try to help.

And finally, our thanks go to Wikimedia Polska, the Wikimedia chapter for Poland, who generously agreed to cover Tomasz’s travel costs to Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Dziękujemy, Wikimedia Polska!

posted 04-04-2012 by Maarten

„Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data“

„Layar is a Dutch company [that has] created a mobile browser called Layar. The browser allows users to find various items based upon augmented reality technology.“

„Raul Kern is a Wikipedian from Estonia who created a Wiki Loves Monuments layer for Layar that allows finding nearby monuments with your Smartphone.“

Raul used our global monuments database and added some creativity. The database is filled by the information from the different Wikipedia monuments lists and updated regularly. The result is a large international cultural heritage database. The more data available – especially geo coordinates – the more useful apps can be created. On the other hand, tools can help find monuments with missing images and thus be nice for participating in the photo contest. That’s what the Wiki Loves Monuments layer does.

Try it out in your region, it’s easy and fun! You need a Smartphone with the Layar augmented reality browser, and add the monuments layer to the app. Switch on the GPS functionalities and go out hunting monuments!

Have a visual impression how it works in this subtitled video:

P. S. Yes, the last monument in the video is definitely listed in Wikipedia, but sometimes GPS has its limits …

P. P. S.: the video is stored on Vimeo and subtitled via Universal subtitles If you feel like creating subtitles on Commons, I can upload an .ogv file to Commons. Just give me a sign via ew_wp[at]web.de.

posted 22-03-2012 by elke

Besides the already known prizes for the best pictures in the several categories, we also announced a prize for the best monument video. Open Images has generously provided a Unlimited Spotify account for 20 months for the best video.

The winner of this prize is this French video about an old wallpaper printing machine (built in 1877). The video shows “the 26 colors machine”, famous for being the first one to use 26 colors for printing wallpapers. Such a machine was a moving piece, with gears, paint, paper and men around it: a video is the only way to make it live again. The video – one of a whole set videos – also unfold various viewpoints, from the tiny details of a golden cylinder to a view of the surrounding building.

It provides something that cannot be shown in a static picture: a sense of both beautiful details and the surrounding building, which is typical of industrial age. Video is incredibly useful for the encyclopaedic purposes of Wikipedia. Whether it is to visualise a chemical reaction, watch lifeforms evolve in their environment, or see how a machine actually works. If an image tells a thousand words, then imagine what you can tell in 24 images a second.

Just like the rest of the Wikimedia Commons, all videos, including the winning one are free to use, for any purpose, provided you follow the attribution requirement. All our videos are also encoded in an open format so that you can play them at home without proprietary software. There are also tools to add and translate subtitles, making the knowledge truly available to anyone.

posted 15-02-2012 by Lodewijk

After almost a year of preparations we’re proud to announce the winner of Wiki Loves Monuments 2011. Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010 as a photo competition in one country (Netherlands) and turned into a European competition in 2011. 18 countries participated in the organization and over 165.000 photos were contributed by over 5000 (mostly new) users. Of these 160.000 photos 169 finalists were selected for the European jury. The jury consisted of the following members:

• Michael Biedowicz, director of photography of the Zeit Magazin
• Ann Branch, head of the Culture programme and actions unit at the European Commission
• Sebastiaan ter Burg, professional CC-BY-SA photographer
• Tomasz Ganicz, president of Wikimedia Polska, Wikipedian since 2001 and enthusiast photographer
• José Gustavo Góngora, Wikipedian since 2006 and philologist
• Marina Milella, archaeologist in Rome and Wikipedian since 2004
• Sneška Quaedvlieg-Mihailovic, Secretary-General of Europa Nostra

The jury selected the following 12 photos: 11 runners up and 1 winner. The top 13 photos will be bundled in a calendar. The full jury report with the top-26 and the reasoning of the jury is available here, on Wikimedia Commons.

Congratulations to Mihai Petre and all the other photographers!

Winner

(1) Winter picture of Chiajna Monastery. The monastery is situated on the outskirts of Bucharest, Romania. by Mihai Petre

posted 12-12-2011 by Maarten