Wiki Loves Monuments 2016: follow up and thank you!

Every year thousands of people from across take part in the world’s largest photography competition. After a hiatus in 2015, the UK took part in this year’s competition. The winners were outstanding, and if you haven’t seen them yet you can do so on our blog.

For the UK, 266 people uploaded more than 6,270 photos. This brings us one step closer to our ultimate goal which is to have an image of every historic site in the country. An impressive 3,911 of these came from three people, and altogether eight people added more than 100 photos to the competition. Some of these people are veteran editors who dive into the competition, some have taken part in our previous competitions, and at least one person created their account during the competition. The competition motivates people to go out and photograph their surroundings.

All the images sit on Wikimedia Commons, the image database that underpins Wikipedia and its sister sites. A proportion of these will end up in Wikipedia articles, on Wikidata, WikiVoyage, or even WikiBooks, about 15.4% as of writing from the UK entries across the three editions. The rest build a valuable free resource of visual media that can be used for journalism, graphic design or many other disciplines in which creators need open licensed images. Ending up on Wikipedia is not the be all and end all (there are only so many images that will fit on a page!) but does reach a huge audience.

So we want to give a big thank you to everyone who took part in the competition this year! We would especially like to thank top contributors Edwardx, Philafrenzy and Mike Peel.

And finally, congratulations to Colin and Richard J Smith whose photos of the interior of the Royal Albert Hall and Perch Rock Lighthouse respectively placed second and third in the international competition.