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