Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Wikipedia Mounts Massive Monthlong Photo Competition

Hungry for more freely licensed photographs of notable places to illustrate entries on Wikipedia, Wikimedia is holding a gigantic photo competition.

Lasting the month of September, “Wiki Loves Monuments 2012” is “expected to be the largest photo contest in the world by a wide margin,” according to the Wikimedia Foundation.

About 25,000 images have been uploaded since the contest kicked off on Saturday.

This is the third year of the competition, though the first was only in the Netherlands, and the second in Europe.

Last year, 5,000 volunteers uploaded 168,000 photos. Perhaps most excitingly for the project, 80 percent of the contestants had never contributed to Wikipedia before.

This year, 30 countries are participating, including the U.S. for the first time. Each country’s winner will compete for the international grand prize of a trip to Wikimania in Hong Kong next year.

To help inspire and solicit uploads, Wikimedia built an Android app that maps nearby monuments and accepts contest entries.

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