Best competition images are among the Picture of the year winners and finalists

Earlier in May, Wikimedia Commons picture of the year has been announced. It was the eleventh edition of the annual Wikimedia Commons image competition, which recognizes exceptional contributions by users on Wikimedia Commons.

All images promoted to featured picture status in 2016 were eligible for participation which means images from photographers and illustrators that the Wikimedia Commons community has chosen as some of the highest quality on the site.

There were 4765 people who voted in total and 1475 candidate images.

The winning image of Jubilee and Munin, Ravens of the Tower of London, got 615 votes.

Wiki Loves Earth 2015 and 2016 finalists came with second, eleventh, and four more places among 58 finalists. Congratulations!

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Second place: Wild elephants walking up a road in the area of Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. Photo by Khunkay, CC BY-SA 3.0. The image won the 5th prize in the national contest of Thailand in Wiki Loves Earth 2015.
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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”