Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Summer of Monuments Begins
This was a draft for a blog post that has since been published at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/04/introducing-wikipedia-summer-of-monuments/
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Wikipedia Summer of Monuments Begins
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Happy July, everybody, and welcome to the the Wikipedia Summer of Monuments campaign! We are seeking photographs of historic sites and focusing especially on those Southern states whose history and present are underrepresented on Wikimedia Commons. These are a contiguous block of states extending from the East Coast to the middle of the country: Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, & Kansas.
At the forefront of this effort will be local historians, librarians, photographers, and anyone else working passionately to preserve and analyze our culture. We are pleased that we can offer prizes to the best photographers and to the institution that contributes the most valuable collection. But we also hope to demonstrate how Wikimedia Commons can be a valuable ally for historians: an amazing free resource for sharing and preserving their materials.
If all goes well, we can use our "Monument" momentum to develop Wikipedia even further in some of these less-digitized areas. We are seeking communities (be they interested in a specific location or in a theme, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Trail of Tears) that we can support in their use of Wikipedia to catalogue and preserve the resources and information they value.
We are calling all Wikipedians who live and work in these ten Southern states to join us in this project, and to share with us their ideas for creatively expanding our collective encyclopedic project. If you want to participate in the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, you can find a nearby Nationally Registered Historic Site using this convenient map tool. Or you can upload images directly using this form.
We hope you have a fun and fulfilling summer.
— Wikimedia DC