WLE 2022 has the first results!

39 countries participated in the competition this year – that’s a record number for our project’s 9-year history! Most of them have already finished a contest in their countries. Now it’s time to select local winners.

Meanwhile, let’s check the results of the contest so far:

🌳Over 3,800 people participated in the contest;
🌳Wikimedia Commons received over 45,000 new photos of nature-protected areas;
🌳Over 4,600 images already illustrate respective articles on Wikipedia;
🌳Over 2,700 people joined the contest for the first time;
🌳Top countries with the most images: Germany, Wales, Brazil.

Thanks to everyone for participating, and stay tuned to explore the winners of local competitions! After local winners are submitted, the international jury will select global winners in November.

Winning Photos in National Сategories. Part 1

A record number of over 131.000 pictures were submitted as part of Wiki Loves Earth this year. Photos were crowdsourced from more than  15.000 uploaders in 35 participating countries! Each of the participating communities chose their best ten pictures which represent them in the international round of the competition. Now the seven-member jury has the hard task to choose the best pictures worldwide.

This year, the contest again included a collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym UNESCO. Contestants were invited to upload photos in a separate category for UNESCO biosphere reserves in 120 different countries.

Now, when international judges are sorting the best from the best,  let`s have a look at the selection of winning photos – one from each country.

Choose your winners and follow our publications!

 One of the finalists in the national contest of Algeria

Wonderful rocks 1
Parc culturel de l’Ahaggar. By Abderrezzak koriche , CC BY-SA 4.0
Continue reading “Winning Photos in National Сategories. Part 1”

How Wiki Loves Earth goes in CEE countries

This year, nine of the Central and Eastern European countries are organizing the national stages of the international photo competition “Wiki Loves Earth“. Six of them are right now in the middle of the one-month contest period, which traditionally starts on 1 May, for one country – Moldova – it starts on 15 May, and the last two – Bulgaria and Georgia – opted to carry out the contest during June.

Although a photo contest, “Wiki Loves Earth” blends well together with the regional article writing contest “CEE Spring”, where one of the categories in each country’s article lists is dedicated to nature and geography. Pictures uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for the photo competition can easily contribute to making these articles better illustrated, both locally and crosswiki. The countries that opted to organize their national stages of WLE in May are Azerbaijan, Greece, Latvia, Russia, Serbia and the WLE inventor Ukraine.

Stopića cave is a limestone cave on the slopes of Mount Zlatibor in the Dinaric Alps, in western Serbia. This was the #1 finalist in the international stage of “Wiki Loves Earth” 2016. (Author: Cedomir Zarkovic. Source: Commons. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Azerbaijan participates in this year’s CEE Spring lists with 37 articles on nature or geography, including the overview articles about “National parks of Azerbaijan” (and 5 national parks) and “State reserves of Azerbaijan” (and 12 out of 15 reserves). 19% of their proposed articles are covered in the rest CEE languages, with Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian having all or almost all of them! The most translated articles across CEE are those about all national parks and the Zangezur National Park, with 11 versions of Wikipedia containing each of them. In the meanwhile, the Azerbaijani WLE page shows all these national parks, state reserves and sanctuaries in a beautiful physical map. The 116 images uploaded so far in the photo competition have been contributed by 14 photographers. Only one of these fresh images has been used in the local version of Wikipedia – and maybe the CEE community can help a bit to change this! 🙂 Continue reading “How Wiki Loves Earth goes in CEE countries”

Contest’s statistics

Today we have only 12 countries that started «Wiki Loves Earth» 2014. Unfortunately, Greece isn’t in this list now, but we hope they will be there soon.

Ukraine is in the first place with 1996 photos. Austria has 1899 photos. The third place has 1885 photos. Here’re Spain&Andorra.

The other countries are in the following order:

4. Macedonia with 1259 photos

5. Germany (1102)

6. Armenia (858)

7. Brazil (533)

8. Nepal (251)

9. Azerbaijan (192)

10. Netherlands (180)

11. Ghana (91)

12. Estonia (78).

Some beautiful photos from this year contest:

Artificial lake Mladost , Veles, Macedonia. Author: Bijonse

Aragats mountain, Aragatsotn, Armenia. Author: Alexander Mkhitaryan B

Cataratas – Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. Author: Rodrigo28

The view of the Himalaya seen from Phoolbari Village, Nepal. Author: Skrissh2013

Azerbaijan. Author: Alikooo.

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park, Netherlands. Author: Bnms

Mountain Afadjato, Ghana. Author: General DeLa Rey

Oru Landscape Protection, Estonia. Author: LeaRand

Read more at the international Facebook page ot in Instagram.

Contest is over. First summary

Chestnut tree alley in Poltava. Photo by user Сарапулов, sent 20 seconds before deadline

“Wiki Loves Earth” 2013 is over today at 0:00:00 Kyiv time with 11736 photos uploaded from April 15 to May 15 by 365 contestants. About 100 000 internet users visited Ukrainain contest site.

Among various Wiki Loves… contests held by different  Wikimedia Chapters (Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Pride, Wiki Loves Sound, Wiki Loves Libraries etc.)  only the Monuments contest became international for now. Ukraine’s statistics in  “Wiki Loves Earth” is similar to first Wiki Loves Monuments held by Netherlands in 2010. We have confidence that next year “Wiki Loves Earth” will become international, which is already negotiated with different Wikimedia chapters.

Continue reading “Contest is over. First summary”