Officially Amazing: World Record
The 2012 Wiki Loves Monuments competition has now officially been recognized as the World’s Largest Photography Competition! As the 2011 competition was
already recognized by Guinness World Records previous year, they have now also confirmed that the 2012 competition has broken its own record. With 353,768 photos it was more than double the amount of photos collected by the previous edition. As Guinness World Records likes to say: we’re now officially amazing.
While the 2011 competition was organized “only” in 18 European countries, the 2012 edition was expanded to 33 countries all over the world. More than 15,000 people contributed last year to achieve this wonderful result, 10,000 of them never having contributed to Wikimedia projects before. Additionally, most of the contributors admitted that they wanted to contribute to Wikipedia more than they wanted to participate for the contest. All 353,768 photos (and more outside the Guinness-definition of the contest) were made available under a free license and now can be used in Wikipedia to illustrate articles about the monuments and other topics. Isn’t this a wonderful achievement to rejoice about?? Well, wait…
Current overview of participating countries, 2013
We’re not done yet. Coming September (yes, one week from now!), we will once again try to break our own record. As it is very hard to expand beyond ‘the world’ (there are no monuments yet on Mars, that Wikipedia knows of), it will be a major challenge to break once again our own world record. We will need all the help we can get to do that! More than 40 countries will participate this year, with a number of countries joining us for the first time (for example the
United Kingdom and
Armenia) but also many countries that participated before, including
the Netherlands, the
United States and
South Africa. Do you live in one of the
participating countries or did you visit them for your holidays? Submit one or more pictures in September following the instructions of your country. That way you make a chance to win wonderful prizes, participate in the biggest photography competition in the world and you help Wikipedia!
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Lodewijk "Effeietsanders" Gelauff has been an active member of the Wikimedia community since 2005; over the years, he helped out as a steward and an administrator of several wikis as well as a board member of Wikimedia Nederland, member of the Chapters Committee and organiser of various internal Wikimedia activities.
In 2010, he led Wiki Loves Monuments in the Netherlands together with Maarten, and was mainly responsible for the community-related part of the contest as well as for documentation, and internal and external communication. In 2011-2013, he was a member of the international organizing team. After that, he has remained involved as jury coordinator and advisor.
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