Dear Florence
I join in the congratulations for getting to a new round of funding for Wiki loves Africa photographic competition.

I was an early fan of the idea but I have to confess that my fan status has markedly cooled over time. I cannot claim to have done a comprehensive reseach but did some checks here and there.
So I have the impression that
a) the competition has brought a number of really beautiful photographs
b) the competition has brought lots of images which are not used anywhere in wikipedia articles (my short checks give me the impression that could be the case for the vast majority of images produced)

and I ask myself if the reason  may be that a lot of these mages is frankly unusable.
 
I remember that prize selected image showing some beautiful ladies in Massai attire knitting under a tree  (the year of adornment) which was selected in some winner category but is unusable for any purpose (unless you want to document fake stereoptypes...)

There is a lot of nice looking images which I do not know how to use because of their not clear labelling, unhelpful categories and useless explanations. It helps me as author nothing to see an image and a text like "traditional tools of Ghana/Malawi/etc". This is unusable.

I write this not from the point of view of a lover of beauty (my taste is poor) but just simply from the view of a wikipedia author. I would love to have some  thousand images (not necessarily beautiful) which just show African villages. We know the criticism about the white spots on the African maps of knowledge. Villages back home in Germany may have less than 1000 inhabitants but 3 articles about the village, about its church and about the sports club. Images are available and people look for them.

We have put in hours and hours of work doing stubs about Tanzanian wards and are nearly complete. Most Tanzanian wards are optically pretty boring villages which often look similar and rarely have remarkable and distinguishing architecture, sometimes landscape features in the background. A photographic challenge in my view is to catch (a less boring?) scene  with some signboard that has has the name of the local school, ward office  or church on it to make identifiable. I do not get them unless I travel myself overland and take pictures. But our users would love to see them!! And I assume that it may be similar in other countries.

I do not want to denigrate Wiki loves Africa but i would love to hear from others how they see the value of the results as they have been so far.  Why do we do it - what do we get from it? How can images about "play" be useful for closing the white spaces on the African map of knowledge?

Cheers, Ingo - "Kipala"
Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili user group

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