David Corral Gadea’s photo of the Roman Aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, Wikimedia Commons POTD for 22 January 2012.

As an active contributor to Wikimedia Commons, Spaniard David Corral Gadea understands the advantages of taking part in a community of fellow photo enthusiasts. For him, the project serves as a tool for sharing the wonders of his own culture and history with the rest of the world.

Although he is not a photographer by trade, Gadea has been able to utilize his skills in his work as a graphic designer and a web designer. He explained that his parents introduced him to the world of photography, as they took an interest in the process of capturing and collecting images as amateurs. However, he attributes his growing interest in photography to the encouragement of his partner, who gave him the confidence to share his photos with the world. “It was my partner who has been encouraging me to introduce my photos to competitions and enhance that facet of my creativity,” said Gadea. “I think she made a good point because it hasn’t been going badly.”

Since publicly displaying his images on Commons, Gadea has had personal success within the larger community. Not only has his image of the Roman Aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, been chosen as the Commons Photo of the Day, but it has also been awarded second prize in the worldwide Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition. To capture the image, Gadea took advantage of a family vacation. “I have been fortunate to be in interesting places, while always having my camera with me,” he said.

“The day I took this photograph there was a spectacular blue sky. It was a beautiful day of summer with good weather and we had a fantastic night wandering around the old town, taking pictures and enjoying the friendliness of the people of Segovia,” he said.

Gadea also explained how he has always been drawn to images with an epic quality about them, which has greatly influenced his own work. In his Aqueduct photo, Gadea utilized a low angle to create a larger-than-life quality, while still focusing on the beauty of the natural world around him. “I have always been struck by the pictures that are out of the norm, spectacular photographs that take you to cry, WOW!” he explained.

Gadea expressed his surprise upon learning of his placing in the Wiki Loves Monuments competition. He added that he hopes similar competitions will inspire more amateur photographers to contribute to Commons and Wikipedia.

“It was a pleasant surprise to discover that my picture had been awarded,” he said. “I am very proud that my contribution has helped bring attention once again to an emblematic monument as the Aqueduct of Segovia. I warmly thank the effort and work of each and every one of the people who have made and will enable these projects and many others that will do so in the future.”

Jawad Qadir, Communications Intern

This post is available in 2 languages:

English  • Polski

English

The winning pictures from the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo contest have been presented in an open exhibition at the largest railway station in Poland: Warsaw Central. They will be up from January 8-27, 2013.

Wiki Loves Monuments photos at Warsaw Central station./ Zdjęcia z Wiki Loves Monuments na Dworcu Centralnym.

The exhibition was organized by Wikimedia Polska, the Wikimedia chapter in Poland, in cooperation with the OPEN Gallery, an initiative of Polish State Railways that presents open cultural events at selected train stations in Poland.

The WLM images are displayed on B1 size posters placed on six rectangular holders, standing in the main hall of the station, next to the stairs leading to the platforms. The exhibition consists of 10 posters with winning pictures of Polish monuments, 13 posters with pictures of monuments from all over the world, and two information boards, one describing the Wiki Loves Monuments competition and the second advertising participation in Wikimedia projects. Posters with photos are accompanied by QR-codes directing to the relevant Wikipedia articles.

OPEN Gallery has provided the display location and media outreach. Wikimedia Polska prepared and printed the posters. The main coordinator and initiator of the exhibition is Adam Kliczek (User: CLI).

Photos can be viewed in Warsaw until 27 January, then they will be transferred to the railway station in Gdynia or Wroclaw.

Tomek “Polimerek” Ganicz, Wikimedia Poland

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(This guest post comes from David Narváez, one of the organizers of Wiki Loves Monuments in Panamá. You can see the winning photos from the country here.)

El Cementerio de Corozal, 2nd Place, WLM Panamá

I started off by building our site using WordPress, the blog and content management system every volunteer in the team learned to tweak and love. We could have gone with other free software content management systems we are more used to, like Drupal, but we figured out that using the same technology most other countries were using for their WLM sites would help us leverage theme expertise from larger organizations.

WordPress provided a large set of plugins that helped us build a very dynamic website with just a few clicks, and most important of all, we were able to provide it in Spanish almost without any effort thanks to the great work of the internalization team for WordPress.

With the site online, we started thinking about putting the large plugin database to good use. One thing that came up was the idea to show the list of monuments that we built for WLM Panama in an interactive map using Open Street Map. While the toolbox for Wiki Loves Monuments already included such a map, by the time we started looking for a way to display our monument list, the WLM map did not work with our list. Because we needed to put the map online sooner rather than later, we decided not to wait for the toolbox map. We found the Fotomobil.at OSM Plugin, which lets you provide a text file that specifies all marks in the map, but we still needed an automated way to build the list of markers from the Mediawiki table on Spanish Wikipedia. After a lot of search (and I mean a lot of search), we found the Pijnu/Mediawiki-Parser tandem to parse the Mediawiki text and look for title, image, location and description of the monuments.

Once the site was complete, the next challenge was to develop a jury tool that would let juries browse the photos in the two categories we had, with monuments grouped by geographical location, EXIF metadata information for each photo and a simple account system. I ended up writing a web application, heavily based on the Dojo Javascript Toolkit. The database with the information for this tool was also provided by parsing the information from our list of monuments, but with the additional requirement of actually fetching the photos in various sizes. For this task, I went back to a project I was already familiar with: the MediaWiki API Client for Python.

One last task we needed to undertake was to move all of the photos uploaded to the contest through Flickr to Commons. Our obvious way to do this was to use the Flickrripper bot from the Python Wikipedia Robot Framework. Despite the issues we found with Flickr’s API, we managed to do a lot of our task using a patched version of Flickrripper. And speaking of API failures, I must add that during the whole process we never had a single glitch, or an unmet requirement from Wikimedia’s API, so I must stand up and congratulate the team of system administrators behind the Wikimedia projects.

In the aftermath of the event, after enjoying a very interesting prize ceremony, reading articles about WLM in our local newspapers, taking a break from the hard work around WLM and planning for next year, I’m starting to take on the large path of patches, integration code and development to collaborate with the many Open Source projects that made this a successful event for us. We are also contributing with donations to some of the projects that were key to our success, and expect to keep this tradition in years to come.

David E. Narváez, Wiki Loves Monuments, Panamá

(This video is part of a series for this year’s Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. You can support Wikipedia and free knowledge by contributing at donate.wikimedia.org. If you have trouble viewing the video below, try watching it here.)

When Erlan Vega stumbled upon Wikipedia in 2005 while doing research for his father, he couldn’t have imagined how it would change his life. Vega was studying to become an English teacher in La Paz, Bolivia. While on Wikcionario, the Spanish Wiktionary, he met a fellow Wikipedian and they not only worked together to fight a vandal, but helped each other learn their respective languages.

“We made a sort of a non-written deal that, I teach you Spanish, you teach me English. And we corrected each other and we learned the language by editing on Wiktionary in English and Spanish,” he explained. ”My English got so much better.”

Vega credits his experience with Wikipedia in helping him pass the needed English certification, “when I finished my studies in English, I was so proficient in the language that I passed my certification test.” Vega got hired on the spot and, he said, “I got married because I got a little bit more stability, and I have a daughter because of that. So, Wikipedia has changed my life. I don’t know how my life would have been had the projects not been started.”

As an English teacher, Vega finds Wikipedia to be an empowering tool. “In my education system, people don’t usually write. They don’t write, they don’t create. They just receive information, and they’re supposed to memorize it and then they have the test,” he said. Wikipedia gives students the ability to create something rather than just regurgitate facts. “Giving a person the opportunity to be creative and to be recognized for something they write” was a turning point in his life, and he hopes that his students have the same opportunity.

Like a lot of people, he uses Wikipedia as a first step in researching a topic. “Wikipedia opens the door for people that want to go further,” he explained. On Wikipedia, “there is a reference, then you go to your library. There’s a lot more there. Books are hidden in your library. What we are doing is to try to get the best of them and show it to you.”

Vega finds his role as an administrator (a bibliotecario on Spanish Wikipedia) to be similar to a janitor.  As problem-solving janitors, “we go, we mediate, we try [to] solve things, we try to understand the two positions and see what we can do about it,” he explained. “I don’t like to think of [myself] as a police officer. I like to think of [myself] like a friend who helps you find your way in Wikipedia, helps you find a way to share this dream we all have.”

“I write on Wikipedia because I believe it’s the first place where you can find knowledge to share with others. I mean, at some point, somebody wrote an article that I was interested in, and I think I owe it the same to the person and to the world to do the same, in a sense.” Wikipedia is about giving back.

As a teacher, father, and husband, Vega is busy, but he enjoys spending his free time on Wikipedia and hopes other people find the time to join the community as well. “Many people say, ‘I don’t have time for Wikipedia.’ Yes you do. You do a lot of things that only are for you, that you are the only recipient of those benefits. Why not give back something to the community,” he said. “We are a great community. If people at any time doubt it, join us, we will be happy to have you.”

Profile by Alice Roberts, Communications Intern
Interview by Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller

Tomb of Safdarjung, New Delhi, India. International grand prize for best photograph, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012.

The international jury for Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 announced the 15 winning photographs from the world’s largest photo contest, which ran from September 1 to September 30. More than 15,000 photographers uploaded more than 350,000 freely licensed photographs of historic buildings, monuments and cultural heritage sites in 35 countries to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and other free-knowledge projects.

The grand-prize winning photograph, above, depicts Safdarjung’s Tomb and marble mausoleum in New Delhi, India, and was taken by Pranav Singh. The tomb was built in 1754 and is an example of Mughal architecture. It was a tribute to the prime minister for Muhammad Shah, the Mughal emperor from 1719 to 1748. As noted in the jury report, “With gravity and a perfect sense for the angle of view and light, this picture presents the object – the architecture and light forming a stage for the tomb, focusing on the details of the stone carving.”

Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 more than doubled the photo total from 2011, when 5,000 photographers from 18 European countries uploaded 168,208 photos. In the 2012 contest, volunteer Wikipedians in 35 countries organized the contest at the national level, with the 324 winning photos from national contests considered by an international jury for the top prize. The grand prize is a trip to Hong Kong for a photo tour as part of the Wikimania 2013 conference. The top 13 photos will be displayed in a travelling international exhibition, and will be showcased in a special Wiki Loves Monuments calendar for 2013.

“We have a beautiful selection of images representing the world’s heritage,” said Lodewijk Gelauff, one of the international coordinators of the contest. “I’m so proud of the hundreds of volunteer Wikipedians who helped organize the contest in their countries and around the world. Not only do we have hundreds of thousands of free images that anyone can use, but we also have a great set of heritage lists on Wikipedia, which give an overview of more than 1 million monuments globally.”

He added, “That leaves plenty of unphotographed monuments for next year!”

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Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and the Ebro River, Zaragoza, 3rd Place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Spain

Photographers in Spain uploaded nearly  40,000 images, second only to Poland when it comes to sheer output in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012. In addition to announcing its top 10 images to compete in the international competition, Spain also released a top 100, which is full of gorgeous photos.

The stunning sunset image above is of the Basilica of our Lady of the Pillar, along the Ebro River in the city of Zaragoza. The church venerates the Virgin Mary and dates to the early history of Christianity in Spain. Of the finalists in Spain, two photographers each had three images, while the city of Toledo was represented with three images, Ávila with two.

Wiki Loves Monuments is the largest photo contest in the world with more than 15,000 people uploading over 360,000 images in 2012. Every photo is freely licensed for use on Wikipedia or any other free-knowledge project. Check back here as the international winners will be announced tomorrow, 3 December, 2012.

For more information about Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, visit www.wikilovesmonuments.org and see all the 2012 finalists here.

Darrin Fox, Communications Intern

Acueducto de Segovia, 2nd Place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Spain.

Iglesia de San Pedro – Ávila, 1st Place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Spain.

Hermitage pavillion in Tsarskoe Selo, Finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Russia

More than 16,000 images were uploaded by 1,047 photographers in the Russian national Wiki Loves Monuments contest, highlighting the stunning diversity of Russia’s cultural heritage. Among the top-ten finalists are several of Russia’s historic churches, a panorama of the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastary, a peaceful photograph of the iconic Priory Palace on Black Lake and colorful image of the Hermitage Pavillion in St. Petersburg.

Learn more about Wiki Loves Monuments at the international site and see the other Russian winners here. Be sure to read here tomorrow, 3 December, as we announce the international winners!

Alice Roberts, Communications Intern

The Round Tower in Vyborg, Finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Russia

Priory Palance on Black Lake, Finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Russia

Church St. John of Nepomuk, 1st place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Poland

Photographers in Poland were extremely busy in September uploading photographs for the national Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 contest. Poland saw the most submissions, with over 51,000 images uploaded by 680 photographers.

The top ten images include an array of national monuments, from a peaceful park bridge to a German concentration camp in the city of Lubin. First place was awarded to a photograph of the Church St. John of Nepomuk; second place went to the intricate golden ceiling of the main refectory of the Lubiaz Abbey; and the castle ruins at Ogrodzieniec won third prize.

Be sure to check out the other winning photographs from Poland, and read here tomorrow as we announce the grand prize photograph and the other winning images.

Alice Roberts, Communications Intern

Main refectory in Lubiąż Abbey, 2nd place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Poland

The castle ruins at Ogrodzieniec, 3rd place, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Poland

Kjeungkjær fyr, finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Norway

As you can see from these three shots, Norway’s 2012 finalists in the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo contest are inspiring! The image above is of the Kjeungskær lighthouse, built in 1880 on a tiny island at the mouth of the Bjugnfjorden, in the municipality of Ørland. A number of the other photos depict severe landscapes and remarkable stormy skies.

Stay tuned as we announce the international grand prize and top finalists tomorrow, 3 December 2012. Don’t forget to check out the entire 2012 lineup of Wiki Loves Monuments’ finalists.

Darrin Fox, Communications Intern

Boat, Bamsebu, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 finalist, Norway

Alnesfyret, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 finalist, Norway

Jewish Synagogue in Prešov, Finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Slovakia

These three Slovakian finalists in Wiki Loves Monuments were among the 758 photos uploaded by 29 photographers during the 2012 edition of the world’s largest photo contest.

We’ll be announcing the grand prize winner and the other top photos tomorrow, 3 December 2012. For more information on the contest, visit www.wikilovesmonuments.org

Červený Kláštor Monastery, finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Slovakia

Castle of Smolenice, finalist, Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, Slovakia