Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/The Wiki Loves Africa Photo Contest is Back

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  • Second edition of the Wiki Loves Africa photographic contest is launched !
  • The Wiki Loves Africa Photo Contest is Back

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The second Wiki Loves Africa photographic competition launches across Africa, and beyond, under the theme Cultural Fashion and Adornment. The competition is supported by 8 volunteer groups in Africa, and accompanied by an off-wiki crowdfunding campaign and quality photographic booklet.

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Of the millions of subjects you can read about on Wikipedia, subjects relating to Africa have the least coverage. This is due to a number of reasons, but mainly because many people on the African continent do not know that they can donate their images, videos and audio to Wikipedia. We need a fun way to show how rich, different and delicious Africa really is beyond the depressing headlines. As the two main organisers of Wiki Loves Africa, we (Anthere and Isla) hope that this competition will help close the gap in visual coverage of countries from Africa on Wikipedia.

Join Wiki Loves Africa 2015: Cultural Fashion and Adornment[edit]

Wiki Loves Africa is an annual contest where people across Africa contribute photographs, video, and audio to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The contest encourages participants to contribute media that illustrate a specific theme. The theme changes each year to cover a universal, visually rich and culturally specific topic such as markets, rites of passage, festivals, public art, and urbanity. In 2014, the first year, the theme was Cuisine.

The theme for the 2015 photo contest is Wiki Loves Africa: Cultural Fashion and Adornment!
This year’s contest will ask for entries that document cultural fashion across the African continent. Entrants can submit media that represents fashion as defined by local cultural influences which can be determined by cloth, styles, ways of wrapping and hanging, etc. This theme also includes adornment, that is defined as culturally-influenced jewellery, make-up, hairstyles, body markings, cloths and woven materials.

The contest runs for two months, starting on October 1st and ending on November 30th, 2015. The project will be run across the continent (and beyond). Wiki Loves Africa has Wikimedian teams on the ground in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Tanzania, Nigeria and Uganda who will host specific actions like training and communication. Volunteers are encouraged to host Wiki Loves Africa events in their own countries, and entries from outside Africa will be accepted as long as they feature African fashion and adornments. All entries will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free license and will be judged by a panel of experts from across Africa who will select the best media at the continental level. The first prize will feature a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4.

You are most welcome to participate! Make sure to visit our landing page.
If you live in Africa, get your camera and start shooting now!
If you don’t live in Africa but have some pictures that might be relevant to the contest, please get them from your hard drive and share them with everyone.

Whilst the contest is mostly funded by Wikimedia Foundation through a PEG Grant, the Wiki Loves Africa team also set up a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to encourage the larger community of Wikipedia editors and readers, both in Africa and beyond, to get involved by donating what they want towards the competition’s prizes.

Quality over quantity[edit]

Started in 2014, under the theme Cuisine, the Wiki Loves Africa competition became an unprecedented visual celebration of the universality of food and the diversity of traditional and contemporary cultural practices across Africa. By the close of the competition, 6,116 images were entered by 873 unique contributors from 49 countries. Countries with the largest number of contributions were Ivory Coast, Ghana, Tunisia, Uganda, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa. The country teams Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda hosted twenty seven on-the-ground events for the contest. In addition, there was an enthusiastic response and high participation levels from countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania that did not have local events.

One of the conclusions of Wiki Loves Africa 2014 campaign was that we needed to help participants produce images of better quality. One of the specificities of this contest is that photographic devices used to take pictures are rather basic (⅔ of the pictures taken in 2014 came from smartphones, tablets or low price cameras). We feel it would help to make recommendations to help entrants produce quality images. Wikimedia France recently published a beautiful guideline booklet for amateur photographers, with a focus on Wiki Loves Africa specific conditions. The booklet may be downloaded on Commons.

We would like to thank all members of the team, and in particular Romaine for the technical support to set up banners and use the UploadWizard, and of course ALL the people listed on the local events page. We also thank all the volunteers who are helping out!.

Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood, Wikipedians.

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Here are some examples of pictures you could use to illustrate the post : [1] This is a selection of images I made very quickly to be used in any circumstances :)

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