Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/WikiPortraits at Locarno Film Festival 2025

Infodata

• Name of the project:

WikiPortraits at Locarno Film Festival 2025

• Amount requested:

5000CHF

• Type of grantee:

Organization

• Name of the contact:

Bea Phi

• Contact:

grants{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 Locarno Film Festival is one of the most prestigious global film festivals, attracting over 150,000 attendees per year at its official venues and its satellite events coinciding with the festival. It runs 11 sections, 3 competitions, and 20 awards, all of which bring in significant, notable subjects for us to photograph—both established and emerging—with a prestige akin akin to other global film festivals like Cannes, Venice, Toronto, and Berlin. It also features one of the most beautiful and iconic outdoors theaters in the world—Piazza Grande, which seats 8,000 against the backdrop of the Alps.

Despite its historic prestige and its visually arresting setting, however, the photo presence on Wikimedia Commons for the Locarno Film Festival is a sad state of affairs. There are fewer than 30 photos across a span of over a decade, uploaded in a hodge podge way. It thus presents itself as a unique opportunity for WikiPortraits to both improve coverage of the festival proper as well as the individuals passing through it, as WikiPortraits has experience shooting Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin film festival festivals.

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 anguage editions of Wikipedia, and generate well over 100 million image views per month (in the month of announcement of Pope Leo XIV, we were well over 200 million views!).

WikiPortraits would like to generate photo coverage around the Locarno Film 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 the Locarno Film Festival. 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. Given that WikiPortraits has shot numerous other film festivals for a couple of years already, we have a good understanding of how to be efficient and organized, while remaining within copyright protocols, and generating a high output of high-quality images for Wikimedia Commons.

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. This sense of mutual support emerged from both Art Basel and Eurovision. 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 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 Locarno Film Festival on behalf of the entire Wikimedia community in a coordinated and comprehensive fashion. We have two 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. So far, 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 Locarno Film 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—directors, actors and actresses, producers—added to articles on multiple language Wikis where there weren’t existing photos before. These likely will be shot on the red carpet and photo calls.
• 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 Lucerne Festival, and 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 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 Wikicoverage around the Locarno Film 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 150-200 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 events, we anticipate that our WikiPortraits photographers will upload at least 300 photos. 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 and clean up relevant metadata so they can be discovered by editors. With fewer photographers, we can still take the photos, though we would just be slower in uploading. However, we know that from our previous experiences with film festivals, the images will be quickly used and added to pages and Wikidata items as soon as they are uploaded by us. In other words, the broader editor community will certainly take notice of the uploads and do a lot of the work for us. Our other metric would be to see how active our Swiss photographers are one year out from May 2025, which is when our first WMCH grant was given for Eurovision. The initial group is small, so even having 2 regular contributors would be significant for us.

The fact that we have two Swiss photographers who have covered previous events in Switzerland volunteer to go to Locarno is a good indicator of WikiPortrait’s long term community building.

Project plan

Given housing costs, we intend to send only 3 photographers, likely those who are local to Switzerland or neighbouring countries and can get to the Locarno Film Festival with minimal transportation time and costs.

Activities

• As many red carpets attended and photographed as possible of cast and crew.
• Photos of festival events, whether it’s merely the festival grounds itself or also its varied programming, i.e. panels and discussions, parties and mixers, pop-ups, and so on. Whatever is happening, we will be there to photograph it.
• Editing and uploading the photos we take.
• Discussing and documenting among ourselves the norms of Locarno Film Festival and gathering best practices for future photographers attending.

Budget

• 3500CHF for ~12 days of housing for 3 photographers (they will switch in and out based on personal schedule).
• 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 effort to actively

• 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 do not have the budget for it, but we would like to indicate that it is something we have thought about.

Wikimedia CH answer

The grant is approved. --Ilario (talk) 17:46, 2 August 2025 (UTC)