Wiki Loves Earth winners announced for 2021

Revision as of 04:35, 30 July 2021 by JamesGaunt (talk | contribs) (added author)
Wiki Loves Earth winners announced for 2021
, James Gaunt.

Crab migrations, birds in flight, and remote landscapes are featured among 15 photographs that have been crowned winners of the 2021 Wiki Loves Earth photo competition in Australia, and will go on to compete in the international round.

The competition saw 1510 photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from across Australia from 182 users, 162 of which had never uploaded a photo before.

The annual competition aims to highlight flora and fauna from protected areas, including national parks, conservation reserves and privately held land.

Open from 1 May and 13 June 2021, the competition helps to build a collection of new photos that can be used to illustrate articles on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year's entries also included images of at least five species for which there had previously been no photograph.

The Australian competition was organised by volunteer Margaret Donald, who began editing in 2017 when she first uploaded a plant image to Wikimedia Commons.

“I then started writing plant articles and then articles about the botanists who first named them,” Margaret said. Just four years later she was running the competition and managing a team of five judges and a broader network of volunteers.

This year, a ‘prejury tool’ was used in Australia for the first time, which allowed any keen Wikipedian to assess eligibility and identify a set of the highest quality images for judging.

Volunteers also undertook months of tireless work adding coordinates, categories, metadata and ‘depict statements’ for each image, which all help describe an image and make it discoverable.

“What probably was most rewarding was discovering and linking the hundreds and hundreds of parks with no article and/or poor Wikidata,” Margaret says. “The use of depicts statements now allows any Wikipedian in any language to find those images.”

The 15 winning images were awarded a $100 prize. These photos will now compete internationally against other winners from around the world.

Wikimedia Australia thanks Margaret and the judges for their tireless work and congratulates all contributors to the competition. We hope they are inspired to continue to upload their photos to Wikimedia Commons for years to come.

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