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In English

Catalan Wikipedia is especially active with GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects, but beginning in summer 2012, we started developing “Viquimodernisme“, an unprecedented wikiproject in Catalonia. For the first time, a research group on contemporary design and art history — Universitat de Barcelona’s GRACMON — and around 100 art history students at the same university have made a combined effort to improve Catalan Wikipedia’s content related to their area of expertise, Catalan modernism.

A preliminary audit (in Catalan) revealed that from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, modernism articles on the Catalan Wikipedia needed serious improvement. And we took other key factors into account. First, Wikipedia’s prominent position among the main reference sources when information is sought on the Internet makes it reasonable to work to provide Wikipedia readers with high quality content. Second, Catalan modernism is one of the main assets of our artistic heritage, and Wikipedia is a very useful tool to explain Catalonia to the world. Also, we cannot forget that free knowledge projects in public education entail an important social return, which makes them even more valuable. Finally, plunging on such a wikiproject involved adopting a new paradigm of academic work: assignments became an open task, a permanent, free and widely available work in progress.

The wikiproject planning was based on data provided by the preliminary audit, and once devised, it was presented to students enrolled in several subjects related to Catalan modernism (plastic arts, theatre, design…). Each student commited to edit a Wikipedia article related to the subject they were learning, aiming to obtain or get as close as possible to a featured article. We reached a lucky crossroads: students acquired new knowledge and improved their command of references; professors — members of the research group — provided the needed criterion to assess the assignments and also optimised their research by providing Wikipedia with new data, while the community had an active participation by helping inexperienced editors and intervening when it was necessary. Despite that the experience was positive, several tense situations arose among students and the community, mainly due to a lack of knowledge of Wikipedia’s working dynamics by novice editors. Also, this experience helped us to spot a flaw we need to improve as soon as possible: the need to clarify Wikimedia Commons’ operation and special features, as their command was one of the most difficult issues students had to cope with.

Currently, we can only provide preliminary results of this wikiproject, as we have just started phase 2, which will last until June 2013. During this second semester we will be glad to welcome a fourth actor, Barcelona’s Museu de les Arts Escèniques, which will participate of the wikiproject by offering students a backstage pass to high quality references. But we can state that the results of the first phase of the wikiproject have been very satisfactory and have exceeded even the most optimistic estimates. The signs determined in the preliminary audit show an astonishing growth of Catalan modernism-related articles in Catalan wikipedia, either by number and quality.

Most assignments involved creating new articles, and Catalan wikipedia currently has 416 articles about Catalan modernism available, while in late summer 2012 there were 372! Also, a survey among phase 1 students revealed they were mainly satisfied with the project and their results. Among the most interesting comments, we must stress their willingness to take part again in a similar experience and their satisfaction to know that their assignment has been something useful to the society since the very beginning.

Viquimodernisme is a milestone-setting project among GLAM wikiprojects. Once finished, we will be able to determine protocols and mechanisms that will serve as a reference for future similar experiences. This unprecedented collaboration between academia and Wikipedia has revealed an amazing potential, but we are only on the tip of the iceberg: things are changing, and this is a shared success!

Esther Solé (User:ESM), Amical Viquipèdia

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The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, created between circa 1480 and 1484.This was the first image contributed to Commons by the Walters Art Museum.

This blog post originally appeared via the OpenGLAM Blog.

The Walters Art Museum, located in Baltimore  Maryland, is a model OpenGLAM institution. With a forward thinking staff aimed at opening their collections in unique and innovative ways, and a collection consisting of over 35,000 objects that are public domain, the Walters is prime real estate when it comes to OpenGLAM.

In early 2012, the Walters started partnering with volunteers from the Wikimedia community. The idea for the partnership was hatched out of GLAM Baltimore 2011; a series of events that brought volunteers from the Wikimedia community to the Walters to present about GLAM-Wiki projects. GLAM-Wiki is a project that focuses on fostering relationships between cultural institutions and the Wikimedia community, the community that maintains websites like Wikipedia.

This case study, written by myself and Dylan Kinnett, Manager of Web and Social Media at the Walters, showcases the projects that evolved out of this ongoing partnership. It summarizes key aspects of this partnership:

• The image donation of over 18,000 images to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository that supplies websites like Wikipedia with images. These images are used in thousands of Wikipedia articles in over 40 languages. They have been viewed on Wikipedia over 10 million times and additional metrics are included.
• The changing of licenses on the Walters website to be more open, allowing the public to utilize the Walters website, or Wikimedia Commons, as locations to collect media and curatorial descriptions without copyright restriction.
• An internship modeled after the Wikipedian in Residence concept. This internship is structured for museum studies students interested in new media and open culture. The first Wikipedia intern wrote numerous articles about artworks in the museum, and learned skills focused around art history research, Wikipedia mark-up and policies, collaborative editing and other skills.
• The importance of outreach events in bringing together GLAMs and OpenGLAM community members. Without the GLAM Baltimore event, this partnership may have been delayed or not have happened.

The case study will be expanded to include coverage about the newly developed transcription project, which has the Walters working with Wikimedia community members to transcribe and translate rare Latin documents in the museum collection. These documents will then be shared via Wikisource, a free online library.

We hope that this case study will inspire and engage others to develop open sharing projects and programs. Please forward, share, and brainstorm how your GLAM can share its collections and knowledge holdings to provide further access to the public through OpenGLAM and GLAM-Wiki.

–Sarah Stierch, Wikipedian and US OpenGLAM Coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation

(This blog post originally appeared on the GLAM-Wiki US blog, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.) 

Graduate student and Wikipedian Michael Barera became the first Wikipedian in Residence at a U.S. presidential library last week. Barera, who attends the University of Michigan’s School of Information, is serving as resident at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, which is located on the university’s Ann Arbor campus.

This fresh partnership is a wonderful example of how outreach and education about Wikimedia projects can be key components for fostering opportunities such as this. Barera, who has been editing Wikipedia articles and uploading photographs to Wikimedia Commons for over five years, joined the Michigan Wikipedians, a student club on campus, and the first of its kind in the United States. Through the club, Berera attended a seminar held by the Wikipedia Education Program in the fall of 2012. The seminar educated attendees about the opportunities for using Wikipedia in the classroom as a learning tool and showcased partnerships being held around the country.

Little did Berera realize that the woman who would spearhead the development of his future residency was also in the audience: Bettina Couisneau, Exhibit Specialist at the Ford Library & Museum.

Berera and Couisneau connected at the seminar and Barera started volunteering at the Ford Library, using his skill set to categorize images that the Ford had uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which totals over 11,000 images to date. Berera also created WikiProject Gerald Ford, a project that brings together Wikipedians from around the world to edit content about the 38th president of the United States. The opportunity for a more formal partnership was clear; Berera would be the natural choice for a Wikipedian in Residence at the Ford.

“This position is perfect for me,” said Barera, “It combines my academic passion for history, archives, open source advocacy and technology. I see my role as a facilitator, helping to bridge the gap between those who have the content and those who have the technical skills to make that information accessible to the whole world.” Barera will do just that by serving as a liaison between the international e-volunteer community of Wikimedia and the collections and staff at the Ford. By working with both parties, Wikipedians will gain more access to collections to improve Wikipedia and its sister proejcts, and staff will gain further awareness and knowledge about how Wikipedia works and how to better work with it and it’s community.

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum

With a collection that comprises almost exclusively openly licensed content – federally created public domain materials – the Ford’s collection and resources are a perfect match for Wikimedia projects, which require freely licensed contributions. “With these core similarities, I believe that this collaboration can be rewarding for both parties, as well as the Ford’s visitors, Wikipedia’s readers and the general public,” said Barera.

By improving coverage about President Ford on Wikipedia and related projects, and by educating staff about open sharing, the Ford will be able to expand it’s mission to provide the public increased access to their collections and resources. “Our goal is to have our content accessible to everyone, everywhere,” said Couisneau. “Wikipedia is a new outreach venue for us. Not everyone can visit our museum and library in person, but everyone can visit us online.” With the skill set of Barera, and the advocacy of Couisneau, the Ford will be able to provide online access to their collection via the world’s 5th most popular website, Wikipedia.

Elaine Didier, Director of the Ford, hopes that Couisneau – who went from Wikipedia reader to Wikipedian over the course of developing the residency project – will inspire others to get involved. “I hope that this partnership also inspires more people like her to join with us, become Wikipedians, and help broaden our perspectives and our horizons to inch us ever closer to our goal of collecting ‘the sum of all human knowledge,’” she said.

Sarah Stierch, Wikipedia administrator

Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wikipedia meetup in 2009

Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment Friday, an apparent suicide. Aaron was a prolific hacker and a free culture activist. He was also a Wikipedian. Today, the Internet community at large is reeling from Aaron’s early death, and Wikimedia is joining in remembering an extraordinary individual.

In 2000, as a 13-year-old, he was the youngest finalist in a teen website competition with his project “The Info Network”, an online encyclopedia inviting anyone to contribute their knowledge. Aaron would later recall that while he was not able to find enough contributors for his first web site, “luckily, several years later, my mother pointed me to this new site called ‘Wikipedia’ that was doing the same thing.”

At age 14, Aaron co-authored RSS 1.0, an important web standard. Later he founded Infogami, a startup which would merge with Reddit, which today is one of the most influential social news sites. He led the development of the Open Library, a project launched by the non-profit Internet Archive in 2007 with the aim of offering “one web page for every book”, integrating user contributions through a wiki interface.

In 2003 he started editing Wikipedia. His userpage lists more than 200 articles he started or contributed a large amount of content to. His most recent edit was on Thursday, January 10.

In 2006, he was a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, which in part is elected by the Wikimedia community. It was during that time that he wrote a series of essays about Wikipedia, sharing his concerns, hopes and dreams for the project’s future.

This included “Who writes Wikipedia”, which proposed that the role of casual contributors to the encyclopedia is often severely underestimated, and that protecting the encyclopedia’s fundamentally open nature was critical to its future. “If Wikipedia continues down this path of focusing on the encyclopedia at the expense of the wiki, it might end up not being much of either,” Aaron wrote. His essay triggered a debate and research that continues to this day.

In recent years, Aaron’s focus was on online activism. He believed strongly that the freedoms that we take for granted online are constantly under threat and need to be defended. To this end, he co-founded Demand Progress, and was one of the leaders in the grass-roots campaign against legislation known as SOPA and PIPA, a campaign which Wikipedia participated in through the 2012 Wikipedia blackout. Aaron’s keynote at the Freedom to Connect conference in 2012 re-tells the important story of how SOPA and PIPA were ultimately defeated.

Aaron also strongly believed that the public should have free access to the laws that govern it, and to publicly funded scholarship and scientific research. In 2011, he was indicted for allegedly breaking into MIT’s network to download large amounts of scholarly materials.

Family, friends and those close to the case have raised questions about the fervor and zeal with which Aaron was pursued — Lawrence Lessig’s post “Prosecutor as bully” provides some important background, as does expert witness Alex Stamos’ summary.

Whatever caused Aaron to take his own life, it is a shocking and painful loss of an extraordinary individual who has touched so many through his ideas and actions. His friends and family have started an online memorial to share remembrance stories, and Wikipedians are also leaving comments on his talk page. We join them in remembering Aaron Swartz, a beautiful human being.

Further reading:

• Remembering Aaron Swartz
• Remembrances by:
  • Wikipedia community
  • Cory Doctorow
  • James Grimmelmann
  • Tim Berners-Lee
  • Samuel Klein
  • Quinn Norton
  • Brewster Kahle

Each year on January 1, Public Domain Day is celebrated in many countries around the world – the date where numerous works enter the public domain as their copyright expires (often according to the formula “life of the author plus 70 years”).

See for example this year’s overviews by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Review and COMMUNIA, or the notes by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University.

For Wikimedia projects that curate public domain works, such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, Public Domain Day means that many works become available to be uploaded under each project’s copyright policies. Community members have already started compiling lists to identify poems, novels, paintings and other works that can now be added to each project’s growing repository of free content.

Happy Public Domain Day, and a Happy New Year!

Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)

German courts handed down two decisions this summer that represent significant legal victories for the Wikimedia community and the entire free-knowledge movement in Germany. The District Court of Tübingen in Prof. Dr. Matthias Asche v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. and the District Court of Schweinfurt in Peter Deeg v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. each issued rulings in two different cases in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation. The former case concerned the German right of personality of a living person; the latter concerned the post-mortem right of personality. Both decisions contain several insightful legal observations on the right of personality online, which we feel are worth highlighting and sharing with the Wikimedia community.

Asche v. Wikimedia Foundation

In June 2012, Professor Matthias Asche brought suit against the Wikimedia Foundation, objecting to content in a German-language Wikipedia article and asserting a violation of his personality rights.[1] In particular, he wished to eliminate any mention of his membership in several Catholic student associations.

Asche offered to settle the suit if the Foundation would remove the content that Asche found objectionable, thereby circumventing community processes. We could not consent to a settlement that set the precedent of censoring lawful and accurate content, which community members had already determined to meet the high standards of sensitivity, veracity and neutrality laid out in Wikipedia’s Biographies of Living Persons (“BLP”) policy. It was also undisputed that the information at issue was both accurate and freely available on several other websites under Asche’s authorization.

With this lawsuit, the right of individuals and entities to publish and disseminate truthful biographical information on the Internet came under attack. The Foundation’s mission is to facilitate the robust exchange of ideas and information and, more ambitiously, to provide global unfettered access to free knowledge. Thus, rather than compromise on the movement’s core principles, we chose to defend our community’s right to contribute factual information to biographical articles.

The German right of personality is broader than the analogous U.S. right of publicity. U.S. law prohibits unauthorized commercial use of individual’s name or likeness,[2] but German law goes further in securing an autonomous area of private life for the individual regardless of commerciality. To that end, Germany often protects the right to informational self-determination, i.e. the right of the individual to decide when and to what extent personal facts are publicly disclosed. Asche argued that, under German law, it was unlawful to make content available concerning an individual without that individual’s prior explicit consent in spite of the availability of that same information elsewhere on the Internet.

However, the Foundation maintained–and the court ultimately agreed–the right of personality in Germany is not absolute; rather, the subject’s interest in informational self-determination must be weighed against the interests of Wikimedia users and the general public.[3]

As the German Federal Constitutional Court has previously ruled, absent a truly compelling justification, the individual must tolerate adverse effects resulting from third party reactions to publication of true facts.[4] “Compelling” justifications may include discrimination against the individual in question, social exclusion and isolation, and likeliness of a widespread impact. Such justifications were absent in this case.

Furthermore, the court recognized that the rigid enforcement of the right of personality would inevitably impede the shared mission of the Wikimedia movement to create and grow, among other projects, a “free encyclopedia.” The court determined that the public has a significant interest in having a comprehensive and freely accessible source of knowledge[5] and Wikimedia similarly has an interest in making available truthful facts under freedom of the press. The court found that this public interest and the need to preserve the freedom of the press constituted substantially important interests that outweighed Asche’s right of personality.

Thus, in a victory for our community and the wider Wikimedia movement, the court ruled that the balance of interests favors the Foundation and that the content at issue could remain in the article undisturbed.

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Participants at the recent Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian

(This is a guest post from Sara Snyder, the webmaster at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

Librarians and archivists in the United States have been, and will continue to be, mostly female. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 81 percent of current students pursuing a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLS) degree are women. As of 2011, women accounted for 83 percent of all librarians in the U.S. Archivists—a closely related profession, which also frequently requires an MLS degree—are also female. As of 2004, 64 percent of archivists were women.

Wikipedia editors have been, and will continue to be, mostly male. The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2011 editor survey reported that 92 percent of Wikipedia editors are male. Though important work is being done to try and close the gender gap, the disparity will likely continue to be pretty significant in the immediate future.

Yet—other than gender—librarians and archivists and Wikipedia contributors share much in common. Both groups are motivated by a deep desire to share knowledge with the world, to the point that they have committed their free time to working on the encyclopedia, or have chosen to focus professionally on helping researchers. Both groups have a strong understanding of how to conduct research and how to evaluate and cite authoritative sources. Both frequently have technical expertise with markup languages, metadata standards and information design. But most of all, both groups tend to hold strong beliefs that all people have a right to accurate, unbiased, high quality information, free from barriers and paywalls.

Phoebe Ayers, one of Wikipedia’s best-known and most eloquent advocates, is an academic librarian by profession. In her essay “Why Work on Wikipedia?” she describes the connection between her profession and her contributions to Wikipedia:

For me, the answer is a matter of scale. As a librarian, I am in the business of helping make sure that people get the information that they are looking for in order to do their jobs, educate themselves, satisfy their curiosity and live a fulfilling life…. [Wikipedia] is also working towards these goals, but on a global, multilingual and hitherto unprecedented scale…. It’s a simple matter of efficiency—I work on Wikipedia, and try to make it better, in order to reach as many people as possible.

This desire to maximize the impact of her work as an information professional is one that many of Ayers’ professional colleagues probably identify with. However, many librarians and archivists may not yet realize that the Wikipedia community welcomes and values their contributions.

A backstage pass tour was also a part of the edit-a-thon event

Given the demographics and goals of workers in these professions, recruiting a greater numbers of librarians and archivists to contribute to Wikipedia is a smart strategy to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. I have some additional, anecdotal evidence for the wisdom of this strategy: me. I am an archivist by training, and if it weren’t for outreach on the part of Wikipedians allied with the GLAM-Wiki project, I would not be writing this blog entry. Even though I created my first Wikipedia article over six years ago, I only began to contribute to Wikipedia on a regular basis after two very talented Wikimedians–Katie Filbert and Sarah Stierch–reached out to me and my Smithsonian colleagues in the spring of 2011. They worked to demystify the platform and the community, and explained how institutions like the Smithsonian could partner with Wikipedia in a relationship of mutual benefit. Their efforts led to the ongoing Smithsonian GLAM-Wiki Partnership, which at this point has yielded two Wikipedian-in-Residencies, hundreds of edits and Commons contributions, five Smithsonian-hosted edit-a-thon outreach events and myriad new and recommitted Wikipedia editors.

Two years later, Smithsonian librarians and archivists are the ones demystifying Wikipedia and promoting its ideals of openness and the free sharing of knowledge to our colleagues and to the public. On October 12, 2012 the Smithsonian Libraries and Wikimedia DC jointly sponsored “Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Backstage at the Smithsonian Libraries,” which took place in the main library in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It was our largest edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian to date. The results of the day included a Wikipedia training session for over 40 staff members and volunteers and at least seven new user accounts registered. But the best part of the event for me was looking around the room and not seeing “92 percent this” or “84 percent that.” The room was filled with people of diverse genders, ages, and backgrounds, united in their enthusiasm for learning new skills and for sharing what they know with new audiences around the globe.

That is the Wikipedia community that I am proud to be a part of.

Sara Snyder (User:Sarasays)

(You can read more about the recent Smithsonian edit-a-thon: [http://blog.library.si.edu/2012/10/editing-wikipedia-better-with-friends-and-best-with-librarians/ Editing Wikipedia: Better with friends, and best with librarians!” also by Sara Snyder)

Merrilee wants YOU to work with your local libraries to improve Wikipedia!

Last year marked the start of Wikipedia Loves Libraries (WLL), and in 2012, WLL activities are in full swing, with many events planned in the coming month. WLL was originally conceived as a way of celebrating Open Access Week, but we now have WLL events throughout the year. As a librarian who is interested in seeing more coordination between libraries and other cultural heritage organizations (i.e. GLAM), I’d like to offer some perspectives on why libraries and Wikipedia are so well aligned with one another.

The bottom line is that we share a common mission. We are dedicated to providing free access to information and knowledge. Wikipedians want to strengthen their articles by citing credible sources. If those sources are in print, or hidden behind paywalls, it undermines the important tenant of free access.

Libraries collect those same credible sources and make them freely available to patrons. Partnering with libraries helps keep sources free. Librarians value “information literacy,” which means teaching the general public to recognize, appreciate and rely on credible sources. Sound familiar? Teaching basic Wikipedia editing skills can be a great, practical way to re-enforce information literacy skills.

Encouraging more librarians to become Wikipedians will also help address the gender gap. Librarians are an almost mirror image of Wikipedians in terms of gender – a March 2012 survey of members of the American Library Association found that 80.7 percent of those in the profession are female (versus about 10 percent of Wikipedians).

So, if you haven’t already, reach out to your local librarian. Suggest a WLL event, or find out if you can use library space to hold an editathon on a topic of local interest. Ask for help from your library in promoting events, not only to library patrons, but also to staff. Be patient, and recognize that librarians may move at a slower pace than Wikipedians (and that they have a range of other events and activities on top of their day-to-day duties). Be complementary to see if you can find a way for Wikipedia activities to harmonize with areas where the library is already investing. If you make the effort, I think you’ll have a good shot at creating a beautiful partnership, and creating some new Wikipedians in the process.

-Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research (User:Mlet)

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Librarians during a Wikipedia workshop

150 librarians from all over Catalonia have been trained about Wikipedia to spread it among library users.

Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, with its own language, culture and history. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona.

During the months of June and July 2012, 150 librarians from all over Catalonia have received training about Wikipedia so they can later inform their library users. Meanwhile, the Catalan Ministry of Culture has reprinted 1,500 copies of the Welcome to Wikipedia guide for distribution through the network of libraries.

It is a pioneering collaboration between the Catalan Ministry of Culture and Amical Viquipèdia. The partnership is based on the principle that Wikipedia, as the online door to knowledge, and libraries, as the offline door to knowledge, should work together to provide new levels of access.

Engaging librarians and library users

One of the attendees to a Wiki Workshop in Palafrugell’s library is now a local-focused active Wikipedian

Wikipedia is hugely popular, but how it works internally is a mystery for many. Amical Viquipèdia chose to demystify the inner workings of Wikipedia by organizing Wikipedia workshops for librarians in five of the main cities of Catalonia. During these workshops, librarians learned about the wiki interface and the benefits of open knowledge. They also became familiar with ongoing GLAM-Wiki projects (collaborations between the cultural sector and the Wikimedia movement) from around the world, and were taught how to edit Wikipedia. The librarians now not only understand how to contribute to Wikipedia, but also how to use it as a tool for engaging their users and to reassess their collections and local funds. These newly-trained librarians will now return to their libraries and encourage users to expand their experience by contributing knowledge acquired through their research into Wikipedia.

One of the pioneering experiments within this collaboration has been at the local library of Palafrugell, a municipality on the Costa Brava. (more…)

For much of the past year Wikimedians around the world have been preparing for Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, expected to be the largest photo contest in the world by a wide margin. Building off the success of the 2011 contest, which saw 5,000 volunteers upload over 168,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons, volunteer organizers this year have been compiling lists of historic sites and monuments in over 30 countries, as far-flung as the Philippines, Panama, Canada, Russia, and South Africa.

Wiki Loves Monuments is important to the Wikimedia community because it encourages people to take beautiful photos of historic and cultural relevance, upload them to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, and allow them to be used by Wikipedia or any others from the free culture movement in perpetuity.

The contest is also important because it encourages people who have never contributed to Wikimedia projects to do so in a fun and simple way. While it might take more time and energy to research and write a new Wikipedia article, it’s pretty simple to take a photo of a building and upload it to Commons. In 2011, not only were 80 percent of the contestants who contributed newbies to Wikimedia projects, they have stayed on and edited with greater frequency than the norm. Given the large increase in participating countries this year, organizers are hopeful that up to 10,000 volunteers will participate and will contribute hundreds of thousands of photos to Commons.

In the United States, which is participating for the first time, contestants will take photos of historic buildings, sites and monuments that are part of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). For 5 years, WikiProject:NRHP members have been compiling the lists into tables and creating functionality that allows you to load the lists in Google or Bing maps. The NRHP list has been integrated into English Wikipedia, but there are still a lot of red links, meaning even those sites with photos lack articles to go along with them.

“In the U.S., anybody can photograph any of the 87,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places for this contest,” said Peter Ekman, national coordinator for the U.S. part of the contest and a member of WikiProject NRHP. “By uploading your photos you are sharing our national heritage with everybody in America and in the rest of the world. The photos will be free to use, and free of cost, forever.”

Ekman and other organizers in the US have assembled an amazing jury of photographers, archivists, and Wikimedians who will judge the photos, narrowing the tens of thousands of entries to ten finalists by mid-October. Those ten finalists will be sent to an international jury, which will pick the overall top ten and the grand prize winner. The grand prize will be a trip to Hong Kong next summer for a photo tour and to participate in Wikimania 2013, the annual gathering of Wikimedians from around the world.

You can find full bios for our judges on the http://wikilovesmonuments.us/judging but we’d like to highlight them here:

• Carol M. Highsmith specializes in capturing America with her camera. Her collection at the Library of Congress has over 20,000 photos that she has donated to the public domain.
• Heather Moran is the photographer and archivist of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) where she photographs and works to digitize the Muni collection.
• Rick Prelinger is an archivist, teacher, writer, lecturer and filmmaker. He is the founder and President of Prelinger Archives, co-founder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, and Board President of the Internet Archive.
• Daniel Case has been a Wikipedia editor since 2005, and is now an Administrator. He has focused on WikiProject:National Register of Historic Places
• Howard Cheng is an administrator at both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons who works on the “Picture of the Day” and “On this Day…” features on Wikipedia’s main page.
• Daniel Schwen is an administrator on Wikimedia Commons and contributor of numerous Featured Pictures.
• David Shankbone is one of Wikipedia’s most influential photographers, whose photos appear in over 5,000 Wikipedia articles in 200 languages.

To coincide with the 2012 contest, the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce that it has developed a free Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application for Android smartphones, available in the Google app store. With this app, Wikipedians for the first time will be able to upload photos to Wikimedia sites through their mobile devices. The app displays nearby historic sites automatically, allows users to upload directly through their Wikimedia accounts, and is available in many different languages. The official app launches on September 1, 2012, but you can try the advance version here.

We’re excited to welcome everyone to participate, whether you’re a seasoned Commons photographer with thousands of uploads or you’re a newbie who wants to improve Wikipedia with photos you’re freely licensing for the first time. Starting September 1st and continuing until September 30th, you can upload photos of the monuments around you and be part of history — literally.

(For a list of photo walks and fun events around the U.S., visit Wiki Takes America and sign up in your area. To get started, go create an account on Commons, find your list, and start shooting.)

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteer organizer with Wiki Loves Monuments-US