Macedonia choose their national winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2015. Once we called Macedonia the country of lakes. And the winning photos demonstrated that we were right. There are 5 lakes in the short-list of best photos of WLE 2015 Macedonia. Take a look!

Lake Ohrid

Lake Ohrid straddles the mountainous border between southwesternMacedonia and eastern Albania. It is one of Europe’s deepest and oldest lakes, preserving a unique aquatic ecosystem that is of worldwide importance, with more than 200 endemic species. 

The importance of the lake was further emphasized when it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1979 and when, in 2010, NASA decided to name one of Titan’s lakes after Lake Ohrid. In 2014, the Ohrid-Prespa Transboundary Reserve between Albania and Macedonia was added to UNESCO’s World Network of Biosphere Reserves.^[3] The towns situated at the lakeside are Pogradec in Albania, along with Ohrid and Struga in Macedonia. The lake is otherwise densely surrounded by settlements in the form of villages and resorts – in both basin countries. Continue reading “TOP-10 pictures of Macedonia”

International team of WLE 2015 asked national organizers to choose quality, featured, valued images. What image is quality? Quality images are photos that meet certain quality standards and are valuable for Wikimedia projects. They must be the work of Commons contributors; they need not be extraordinary or outstanding, but merely well-composed and generally well-executed.

Today we presenting you some of quality pictures form France.

Anchusa azurea

Anchusa azurea is a species of flowering plant in the family Boraginaceae, known by the common names garden anchusa^[1] and Italian bugloss (or just “bugloss”). It is a bristly perennial which reaches just over half a meter in height. It has straight lance-shaped leaves and petite tubular flowers of bright violet-blue. This species is native to Europe and western Asia and eastern Maghreb  but is well-known elsewhere as a noxious weed. In Crete it is called agoglossos and the locals eat the tender stems boiled, steamed or fried.

Numerous cultivars have been selected for garden use, of which ‘Loddon Royalist’ has gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit.

Andromeda polifolia

Continue reading “WLE 2015 France – quality pictures”

Wiki Loves Earth 2015 has ended in the most of the countries. And now it’s time to evaluate the photos and select the best of them for international part of the competition. We got first results and Top-10 photos from Pakistan.

As you probably remember we wrote that Pakistanis users were extremely active and uploaded over 11 000 photos. That made Pakistan the absolute leader in the country race till the last week before the end of the contest. Nevertheless organizers managed to choose Top-10 photos of Pakistan in the first couple of days after the end of WLE 2015.

«WLE 2015 took place in Pakistan from 1 till 31 May. We have got over 11 000 uploaded photos. We promoted the contest with social media and central notice banner. The local BBC burro made a story about Wikipedia Loves Northern Pakistan and that’s also gave us extra coverage and good number of participants. Our national part of the contest was focused only on northern areas of Pakistan. That’s the reason why we named it Wikipedia Loves Northern Pakistan. We believe that the northern part of the country is the most beautiful and attractive for the photo competition.

We decided to launch ongoing selecting prosess from the 1st day of the contest. So we asked our jury from the last year competition (Yaroslov from Russia, Daniele from Germany and Marc from Belgium) to judge these year pictures. National team shortlisted 150 photos and gave them to jury. So that’s how we choose national winners that fast», – commented the results of the contest SAQIB QAYYUM, national organizer of WLE Pakistan.

The international winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2015 are yet to be announced, but the Top-10 photos of Pakistan are here: Continue reading “TOP-10 pictures of Pakistan”