Wikimedia UK is delighted to announce the UK winners of the 2013 Wiki Loves Monuments competition.
Wiki Loves Monuments is the world’s largest photography contest. The objective is to collect high quality photographs of some of the world’s most important buildings – in the UK, this means Grade I and Grade II* listed buildings.
Over 570 people took part in the UK competition, contributing more than 12,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons, one of the world’s largest repositories of freely licensed media files. Volunteer editors have already started making use of some of these new images to illustrate Wikipedia.
Steve Cole, one of the competition judges and Head of Imaging at English Heritage, said: “The Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition produced a fantastic range of subjects and photographic styles. Choosing the winners was no easy task. The views of the judges varied enormously, individual favourites fell by the wayside as they failed to excite the other two judges. The winning images present not only a good eye for composition but also the ability to capture the mood of the moment.”
Thumbnails of the winning entries are below but you can see them in all of their glory here on Wikimedia Commons.
Michael Maggs, one of the team of volunteers who organised the contest, said: “Everyone involved in Wiki Loves Monuments is very grateful to all the photographers who donated their images, and to the professional photographers who kindly agreed to act as judges. This is the first time the UK has taken part in the international competition, and we are thrilled with the results. Co-ordinating the contest and organising the submitted images was a significant task that would not have been possible without the backup and close co-operation of Wikimedia UK.”
We are already looking forward to the 2014 contest!
Wow! I thought my photos were good… but these are AMAZING! Well done to the photographers!
Great, a winner that is completly encyclopedic useless … and since Commons is not DeviantArt it is a completly absurd vote!
Hardly any of those photos are usable in an encyclopedia or for educational purposes. They may have some value as postcard images or for poster prints, but they are hardly what is needed in an encyclopedic project. It’s “Wikimedia loves monuments”, not “We love tacky wallpapers”.
The photo that as posted recently in this blog was so much better: see https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/10/the-morning-after-the-month-before/
Sorry, posted too soon: Last sentence should read:
The second prize (that was already posted in this blog recently) is much better in this respect than all the exterior images in this shortlist, as are most of the other interiors.
Congratulations to all the winners & hon. mentions. My own efforts were feeble by comparison (as I knew they would be)but I was grateful for the opportunity to take part & contribute to the pages of local landmarks. Very much looking foward to next year. & thanks to all those who volunteered their services so the project could take place.
Everyone will have their own opinion of the winners, of course, but some of the postings above seem to be based on an assumption that WLM UK 2013 was a Wikipedia project. In fact it was Commons-based and hence had much wider judging criteria than the narrow English Wikipedia concept of ‘encyclopedic value’. The actual criteria were: (1) technical quality, (2) originality, and (3) potential usefulness and overall value of the image (including its licensing) to the Wikimedia projects. The judges were two professional photographers and a highly respected member of the Wikimedia community. More details here: http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org.uk/judging