Wiki Loves Earth 2018 international jury
From Germany to South Africa and from Brazil to India, the international jury represents the geographic diversity of Wiki Loves Earth. They have a variety of backgrounds: some of them are professional environmentalists, while others are passionate photographers. There is one thing they have in common: their enthusiasm to select the best photos of natural heritage sites.
Meet the seven members of Wiki Loves Earth 2018 international jury who are currently evaluating the photos and will allow us to announce the results shortly:
Ananya Mondal, India (User:Atudu)
Ananya remains a Wikipedian since 2015 and actively works and contributes in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, Wikidata and Wikispecies. Her edit number counts to 35000+ and numerous pages. She has contributed articles in Wikipedia in English and Bengali language mainly concerning flora and fauna species and especially butterflies, venomous snakes and female sport activities. Her article creation amounts to 250+ with one in good article category in Bengali Wikipedia about a butterfly.
Ananya is successfully running a scientifically-based WMF-granted project on species and subspecies level detailed documentation of butterflies of West Bengal and North-East India entitled as Wiki Loves Butterfly (WLB) in Bengali Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for the last 3 years with a group of enthusiast Wikipedians, lepidopterists, naturalists, researchers, scientific organizations etc. hailing from different parts of India. Wikipedians from different parts of the world are also included in this project. To the date, the project has documented over 300 species and subspecies of butterflies with more than 100 species pictures in Valued Image Category. She is now known as the Butterfly Wikimedian. Ananya was one of the members of the Organizing team of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) in India in 2018.
Outside Wikipedia, Ananya is a nutritionist by profession, and hobbyist nature photographer and conservationist. She is also fond of Forest Survey, Rock Climbing and Himalayan Trekking.
CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Ayokanmi Oyeyemi is an award-winning professional photographer from Lagos, Nigeria. He has a background in Medical Biochemistry but his interest in art spurred him to pick a career in photography where he specializes in commercial and documentary photography. His photography works had been featured in many journals and editorials across the country, and he has won several photography contests.
He is currently the Head of Photography for Wikimedia Nigeria and has been an instrumental member of the Wikimedia Nigeria community by partaking in organizing of various trainings and edit-a-thons. He coordinated the Wiki Photo Tour Nigeria 2016, his image was nominated as the best image during the Wiki Loves Moments Nigeria 2016 contest, and he also coordinated the national jury for Wiki Loves Earth Nigeria 2018.
CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Brendan has over ten year’s work experience in international development and program management. Currently he is an advisor for the Truth Hounds Human Rights Organization in Ukraine where he conducted field missions in Donbas and developed one of the first methodologies globally on analyzing the environmental impacts of the war. He presented this work at the international OSCE Human Dimensions Implementation Meeting in Warsaw, Poland.
He also lead the five year Framework Program “Education for Sustainable Development in the Western Balkans (2012-2017)”. Through his leadership the Program was instrumental in integrating sustainable development concepts and ideas into the broader educational reforms that are currently underway in the region as part of the global shift to the outcome based learning approach to education. This success was selected as a best practice for the UNECE evaluation report “Ten Years of the UNECE Strategy on ESD (2005-2015)”. It has been promoted at several international forms including the Eighth Ministerial Conference Environment for Europe in Batumi, Georgia (2016) and the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Nagoya, Japan (2014). He was also an observer on behalf of the Regional Environmental Center (REC) in the UNECE Steering Committee on Education for Sustainable Development (2014 and 2015). Prior to that he was a Peace Corps volunteer working as an expert in the European Integration Office in the Garmen Municipality in Bulgaria. While holding that position he worked on a number of European Union funded projects related to sustainable tourism development and community organization and development.
Brendan holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Policy from Central European University. His academic interests include: EU integration, implementation, public policy, multi-level governance, educational reforms through ESD and transformational change management.
Dietmar Bartz, Germany (User:Aalfons)
Aalfons is an active Wikipedian since 2007, with 27.000 edits and 3100+ pages edited so far. He contributed 80+ articles to the German Wikipedia, with some featured ones. Aalfons hosted the jury meeting for Germany’s 2012 Wiki Loves Monuments contest, and he was member of the 2014 national jury for Wiki Loves Earth. Since 2015, he serves in the WLE international juries.
Outside Wikipedia, Dietmar Bartz is a professional archivist, journalist and editor. He has more than 25 years of experience working for newspapers and magazines, for instance for the German editions of “Le Monde Diplomatique”, “Vanity Fair” and “Interview”. He is used to collaborate intensely with photographers and photo editors. As a correspondent and consultant, Dietmar worked in Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, and he is travelling extensively in Asia. His professional focus now is the development and design of global political atlases for use as teaching materials.
In WLE’s international jury, his main fields of interest is the balance of photographic excellence and encyclopaedic information, and also the discussion of non-western visuality and pictoriality habits.
Fayçal Rezkallah, Algeria (User:Fayçal Rezkallah)
Fayçal Rezkallah is a photography artist and trainer in photography is a member of User Group Algeria.
He has made exhibitions of his photos of Faces from the Wikimedia Movement at Wikimedian meetings in Berlin, Cape Town and Grenoble. Fayçal also hosted a workshop on the smartphone encyclopedic photography for the French WikiConvention 2018.
He is currently manager of the Wikinomad project (which you can follow on the project’s Facebook page) and was a jury member of Wiki Loves Africa and Wiki Loves Monuments in Algeria.
Fayçal is the president of ISOCLUB, a photography club that organizes every year the festival “Les jours de la photo d’Oran”
CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Fiona Ayerst has been a professional underwater photographer for 12 years, She shoots lifestyle, environmental and sports imagery, with a specific interest in anything related to water. Fiona has contributed articles and imagery to many local and international magazines, and contributes to stock photography.
In 2003 Fiona was chosen as the South African Wildlife Photographer of the year and in 2006 she was named world champion on popular website http://www.underwaterphotography.com/
Fiona runs training programs for underwater photographers and people participate in anything from month-long internships to 2-week programs and long- weekend courses.
Renato Martins, Brazil (User:Renato Augusto Martins)
Renato Martins lives in São Paulo, Brazil, since his birth, in 1987. He works as a wildlife photographer, exploring the various Brazilian biomes, such as Altantic Forest, Amazon and Caatinga. He also works as a biologist, Master’s Degree student of fauna conservation.
As a photographer, he has more than ten years of experience collaborating with photographs to magazines, scientific publications, sites and books. He has contributed to Wikipedia with many photographs, in manifold articles. He participated in several photographic exhibitions in Brazil. Some of his works are exhibited in Rio de Janeiro. Renato won many prizes in local and international photo contests, among them, the 1st, 4th, 6th, 9th and 10th places in the Wiki Loves Earth Brazil 2017, the 10th place in Wiki Loves Earth international stage 2017, and the 1st place in the Picture of the Year (POTY) contest on Wikimedia Commons 2017.
This year, he was jury member in several photo contests, such as: Wiki Loves Brazil 2018 and Wiki Loves Monuments Brazil 2018.
CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
I find it odd and statistically unlikely that one third of the winners are from a single country! Do you have an explanation for this anomaly. I find it unusual that no winners are from countries where English or Chinese are spoken (I am fluent in both). You must have noted these facts, do you have an explanation? Please do not tell me that this is what the jury chose, I know that. However, it points to jury bias as a possible explanation. I have read the biography of all the jurors, just so you know. How were the jurors selected and by whom? I agree that the images are quite wonderful and from some very interesting places some of which I would love to visit.
I think this can be explained by the fact that the winner is chosen only among countries that take part in the contest. Australia was the only English-speaking country and Taiwan – the only Chinese-speaking country in the participating countries list.