Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/WikiPortraits at Art Basel Switzerland 2025

Infodata

• Name of the project:

WikiPortraits at Art Basel Switzerland 2025

• Amount requested:

5000CHF

• Type of grantee:

Individual on behalf of a group

• Name of the contact:

Kalai Ramu

• Contact:

kalaikrushot.com

In case of questions, please write to grantwikimedia.ch

The problem and the context

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Art Basel in Basel (or Art Basel Classic, as we like to say) is the premier international art fair, showcasing over 280 leading galleries from around the world and featuring works by more than 4,000 artists. It has become such a global brand that the original has now spawned satellite events in Miami, Hong Kong, Paris, and soon Doha. It is considered an officially designated Swiss Top Event along with the Locarno Film Festival and the Lucerne Festival for music.

The Basel events attract a diverse array of notable and soon-to-be notable individuals in the art world, including artists, curators, collectors, critics and gallery owners. In addition, there are several side fairs in Basel during Art Basel week, such as Liste, Volta, and Photo Basel, which focus on emerging artists and photography-based art. Together the Basel events present a rich number of opportunities to take illustrative photos of the art world to improve our Wikipedia coverage.

Despite the prominence of Art Basel, the category’s photos on Wikimedia Commons are a sad state of affairs. As of May 2025, it features the following subcategories: Art Basel 2024 with 1 file (which curiously appears to be a bus ad in Hong Kong); Art Basel in Miami with 22 files; and Art Basel Hong Kong with 15 files. In addition, there are a set of eclectic 30 other files in the category ranging from 2008, 2011, 2012—one of which seems to be of a flyer from the conference.

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), Cannes Film Festival, Nobel Prize week, the American Academy for the Advancement of the Sciences annual conference, the CES tech show, the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the National Book Awards, and the Venice Film Festival, just to name a few events. Photos from these events have been used on over 150 language editions of Wikipedia and generate well over 100 million image views per month.

WikiPortraits would like to generate rigorous photo coverage of Art Basel in Switzerland (and perhaps beyond) 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 Art Basel. 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.

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.

Project goals

We would like to send a team of WikiPortraits photographers and photo editors to help cover 2026 Art Basel on June 19-22 on behalf of the entire Wikimedia community in a coordinated and comprehensive fashion. 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. Two of these Swiss photographers were credentialed at Eurovision in Basel. A number of other photographers are in adjoining regions in France and Germany.

WikiPortraits just received its first media credential for Art Basel. Again, like our Eurovision projects, this is an opportunity to engage new 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 the World Economic Forum in Davos, Locarno Festival, and Lucerne Music Festival (which has been tough for media credentials).

This is our first year for WikiPortraits to apply to Art Basel for media credentialing, and our first attempt at credentialing for an art festival in general, so this is a learning experience for us. While WikiPortraits now has an established track record of covering events such as Eurovision, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, the Nobel Prizes, SXSW, Jaipur Literature Festival, among other events of global significance, we are new to art festivals and are humble enough to realize that.

This is our first big art exhibition, and we need to learn the rules of taking pictures of art in countries with limited freedom of panorama, and also the cultural norms of being a photographer at an art exhibition. We hope to take what we learn to cover the Venice Biennale in 2026 in partnership with Wikimedia Italy.

Please note that 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—likely artists, gallerists, collectors, and museum curators—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 and can help cover other Swiss events such as Locarno Film Festival and the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. 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 Wikimedia 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 Art Basel and art exhibitions in general with WikiPortraits photographers in 2026 and 2027, which involves applying for credentialing earlier. We can also attract a contingent of art photographers in the same way we have attracted concert photographers and sports photographers.

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 more than 150 language Wikis and have been viewed upwards of 100 million times per month, with spikes on big cultural events such as the Oscars, the announcement of the new pope, and Eurovision. We expect that Art Basel would have similar uptake, and be used on at least 70 or 80 language Wikis, if not more. That being said, we have noticed that our number of images may be pushing GLAMorgan to its limit, as the numbers being returned are erratic.

Based on our coverage of past events, we anticipate that our WikiPortraits photographers would upload at least 200 photos of 100-150 various notable or near notable people. We need multiple photographers if we are to be timely in uploading, since they would have to switch off to edit and upload initial photos. In addition, we would need editors to help categorize and caption the photos, as well as clean up relevant metadata so they can be discovered by editors. With fewer photographers, we can still take the photos, we would just be slower in uploading.

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

Project plan

Activities

We would like to send 3–4 photographers/photo editors to Art Basel, pending the housing budget (which is so expensive, we might only be able to do 3). We might be able to support a few regional photographers who come in by train.

We are currently recruiting photographers in Switzerland and beyond to find the right balance of experience and newness to wikimovement.

Budget

• 2750CHF-3500CHF for Airbnb for ~3-4 sleeping slots for 5 nights on June 18-23, based on current Airbnb estimates (as hotels during that period are expensive). We might have some regional volunteers come in and out for a day or two pending their personal schedules rather than staying the whole time. But we are struck by how expensive this is, and are exploring if someone can sleep on couches.
• 250CHF-750CHF for roundtrip train tickets to Basel and ground transportation within Basel for local photographers. This cost will vary depending on where the photographers are coming from. If this is high, this goes towards food.
• 0CHF-250CHF meals and groceries. Mostly in a team capacity. Not sure we will have budget, as it depends on the cost of housing. But Basel is an expensive place to eat, and we want to acknowledge that.
• 750CHF-1000CHF for administrative support, coordination of volunteers, coordination for the credentials (including making sure the wikiphotographers have images on art-related Wikipedia articles as requested in the credentialing process), booking the lodging, photo assignment editing, teaching new editors how to upload to Wikimedia Commons, reimbursements, and page cleanup.
• 250CHF-500CHF for all the metadata cleanup, categories fixing, backup uploading labor for Art Basel. We have found this is necessary for events where we onboard new Wiki photographers to Wikimedia Commons. It is important here not only for Art Basel 2025, but to see if we can get a larger consistency in the category organization.

Note: if the budget comes in low, we would roll it into future Switzerland-based WikiPortraits coverage of an event, such as Locarno, or we would use it to cover Art Basel in Miami or Paris. But looking at housing, this looks like it’s not going to come in low.

Community engagement

In addition to the Swiss and senior photographers we would send, we have ongoing efforts to actively do the following across our events:

• 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 in specific languages, but generally getting photos added to large language wikis is one of the things WikiPortraits has to worry about least.
• 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. Here it is unclear if we will have budget given the cost of housing. But if we have leftover, we will add some money here.

Decision

Dear all, the grant is approved. --Ilario (talk) 10:00, 18 June 2025 (UTC)