Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/WikiPortraits at 2025 Montreux Jazz Festival

Infodata

• Name of the project:

WikiPortraits at the 2025 Montreux Jazz Festival

• Amount requested:

5000CHF (excess funds may be rolled over to other WMCH-supported WikiPortraits events)

• Type of grantee:

Group

• Name of the contact:

Quentin Jerome Thomas

• Contact:

hello{at}wikiportraits.org

In case of questions, please write to grantwikimedia.ch

The problem and the context

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

The Montreux Jazz Festival is the second largest jazz festival in the world, attracting over 250,000 attendees per year at its official venues and its satellite events coinciding with the festival during its two-week runtime in July. Every year, it runs over 50 concerts and hundreds of other kinds of events, like DJ sets and workshops, all of which bring in significant, notable subjects for us to photograph, both established and emerging.

This will certainly be useful for Wikipedia where musicians’ pages are highly popular but, due to difficulties with capturing photographs of them at concerts, lacking in quality imagery. For instance, the Grammy winner and pop sensation Tyla, who appeared at last year’s Montreux Jazz Festival, currently has just a YouTube screenshot for her infobox. André 3000 also performed last year, and his infobox’s image dates back to 2014. Jazz is even more sparsely covered but, due to its history and roots in marginalized, underrepresented communities across the world, is an even more important topic for Wikipedia to cover in order to fill gaps of cultural knowledge.

Not only are musicians generally lacking in quality photography on Wikipedia, but the Montreux Jazz Festival itself is lacking in consistent coverage. Only a few years in the span of half a century have a dedicated category, though there is the GLAM on Tour Montreux Jazz Festival 2022 category which has hundreds of photos, albeit mostly photos of Montreux itself and less about the festival’s performers. All in all, coverage of the Montreux Jazz Festival is lackluster in general and, even with the coverage it does have, is wildly inconsistent in such. It thus presents itself as a unique opportunity for WikiPortraits to both improve coverage of the festival proper as well as the many individuals passing through it.

What is your solution to this problem (please explain the context and the solution)?

WikiPortraits (wikiportraits.org) is an initiative that helps get experienced Wikimedia photographers credentialed to photograph events and upload their photos to the Wikimedia Commons. WikiPortraits has helped get photographers credentialed for Eurovision (thanks to WMCH), Art Basel, Cannes Film Festival, Nobel Prize week, the American Academy for the Advancement of the Sciences annual conference, CES tech show, the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and Venice Film Festival, just to name a few events. Photos from these events have been used on almost 200 language editions of Wikipedia, and generate well over 100 million image views per month.

In an effort to improve jazz coverage across Wikipedia, WikiPortraits would like to cover the Montreux Jazz Festival for Wikimedia Commons, which also as a byproduct, creates a set of Creative Commons-licensed photos that smaller media outlets, who cannot afford to pay commercial photographer licensing rates, can use for their own coverage of it. Given our Creative Commons licenses, we understand the need to be careful that any works we take photos of do not violate the underlying copyright and are largely de minimus. Over the last several months, WikiPortraits has developed an expertise and community around shooting musical performances, to the point we now have a WikiPortraits Music WhatsApp group with contributors across at least 7 countries (and many continents, even Australia!). Montreux is a part of a larger WikiPortraits push globally to shoot more jazz festivals. Among those we have shot or plan to shoot is the La Defense Jazz Festival in Paris, Istanbul Jazz Festival in Turkiye, Molde Jazz Festival in Norway, and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in the United States. The diverse, global footprint of these jazz festivals across many countries indicates the interest the topic generates across many different language Wikis, as well as its importance to many underrepresented communities across the world.

Additionally, our secondary goal is to create a sense of cohesion among Swiss-based professional and semi-professional photographers to contribute more to Wikimedia Commons, as well as build a sense of camaraderie between them and active Wikimedia Commons contributors around the world. We hope that in doing so, we can organize them to go to more events local to Switzerland and thus improve coverage of Switzerland’s various events, figures, and institutions writ large, as was the case with our previous organizing for Art Basel in Basel which significantly improved coverage of the art fair itself, as well as its satellite fairs, and many other GLAM institutions nearby in Basel.

Project goals

We would like to send a small team of WikiPortraits photographers and photo editors to help cover the 2025 Montreux Film Festival on behalf of the entire Wikimedia community in a coordinated and comprehensive fashion. We have 2 Swiss photographers who have already volunteered, Since WikiPortraits was profiled by the BBC in March 2025 (see article), we have had over 150 volunteers write in to contribute to take photos. Of those, 4-5 are based in Switzerland or spend a significant amount of time in Switzerland. 3 of these Swiss photographers were credentialed at Eurovision and Art Basel in Basel. The benefit of developing a strong cohort of Swiss photographers is that they also self-assign more local events in Zurich, or elsewhere.

Again, like our Eurovision and Art Basel projects, this is an opportunity to engage professional-caliber Swiss photographers and bring them into the movement, thus building out a WikiPortraits Switzerland cohort to take photos of other Switzerland-based cultural events of global significance such as Art Basel in Basel and the Lucerne Festival around classical music. Regarding the latter, music events have been tough to get media credentials for, but we hope that continued coverage of a diversity of events via WikiPortraits will help us gain access someday.

While WikiPortraits now has an established track record of covering events such as Eurovision, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, the Nobel Prizes, SXSW, and the Jaipur Literature Festival, among other events of global significance, we are new to the Montreux Jazz Festival, so this will be somewhat a learning experience for us to figure out the specific quirks and nuances of the festival’s operation in order to be more prepared for future years.

Please note, WikiPortraits has an annual planning grant out of North America, and this supplements it on a per event basis.

Project impact

How will you know if you have met your goals?

Our success will be measured following this event this year:

• Photos of notable people—bands, ensembles, individual musicians, and other kinds of performers—added to articles on multiple language Wikis where there weren’t existing photos before.
• An active Swiss WikiPortraits photographer contingent that is active a year out from our first Eurovision in May 2025, and can help cover other Swiss events such as Art Basel in Basel, the Locarno Film Festival, and the Lucerne Festival. We can see this in terms of the quantity and quality of uploads to Commons and general activity, as well as their chattiness in our WikiPortraits WhatsApp groups.
• Strong relationship between the Swiss photographers and more experienced Wikimedian Commons contributors. We can see this in conversations that take place in our WhatsApp groups, or training sessions that they participate in.
• Greater coordinated Wiki coverage around the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2026, which involves applying for credentialing earlier.

Do you have any goals or metrics around participation or content?

WikiPortraits keeps track of our on-Wiki impact through the useful GLAMorgan tool (link), which tracks the total views of photos that appear on articles in any given category. It also gives the popularity of photos on which Wikis and the aggregate number of photos per language Wiki. Through our own regular use of the tool, we know that WikiPortraits photos have been used on almost 200 Wikis and are viewed upwards of almost 200 million times per month, with spikes on big cultural events such as the Oscars, the announcement of the new pope, and Eurovision. Based on our coverage of past jazz events, we anticipate that our WikiPortraits photographers will upload at least 500 photos across some 50 acts (some of which we will miss since the festival has already started). In addition, we would need editors to help categorize and caption the photos and clean up relevant metadata so they can be discovered by editors.

Our other metric would be to see how active our Swiss photographers are one year out from May 2025. The initial group is small, so even having 2 regular contributors would be significant for us.

Please note that our Art Basel numbers page views were surprisingly low compared to Eurovision and Cannes/Venice film festivals. (The English Wikipedia page for Art Basel, as the main fair, only receives 6,000 or so views per month). We don’t know if the weak contemporary art content meant that the Wiki articles were less likely to get exposure, or just that contemporary art naturally has a weaker audience compared to film. We suspect jazz will fall somewhere in between the two.

Project plan

Activities

Given housing costs, we intend to send only 2-3 photographers, likely those who are local to Switzerland and can get to the Montreux Jazz Festival with minimal transportation time and costs.

• Shooting live performances as allowed, including the audience.
• Photos of other festival events, whether panels or, parties. Whatever is happening, we will be there to photograph it.
• Editing and uploading the photos we take.
• Encouraging Wikipedia editors to improve pages which may need improving. This was something we had to do for Art Basel. We hope jazz coverage is in better shape.
• Discussing and documenting among ourselves the norms of the Montreux Jazz Festival for future photographers attending.

Budget

This is similar to our budgets for Locarno Film Festival (submitted somewhat concurrently). If there is money left over, we would roll the money over to Locarno or, more likely, the World Economic Forum in Davos.

• 3500CHF for housing.
• 500CHF for transportation expenses, i.e. trains for Swiss photographers coming in from other regions.
• 500CHF for administrative support, coordination of volunteers, credentialing, booking the lodging, photo assignment editing, teaching new editors how to upload to Wikimedia Commons, reimbursements, page cleanup.
• 500CHF for social media and comms work.

Community engagement

In addition to the Swiss and senior photographers we would send, we have an ongoing efforts:

• Recruit editors to add the photos to relevant pages across different Wikis as the photos become available. This includes both European languages and Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, where we have active WikiPortraits editors. That being said, we have found that, organically, our photos from high profile events are naturally ingested relatively quickly. We can do an extra push if we feel it is not getting uptake, but generally getting photos added to Wikis is one of the things WikiPortraits has to worry least about.
• Post many of these photos on social media on a (timely) basis under the WikiPortraits accounts on Instagram and LinkedIn. This historically has been less a priority for us because we are thinly resourced with a focus on the actual photography, except for Eurovision, where we had allocated budget for. Here, we also have allocated budget for it, so would like to post.