The Wiki Loves Africa photographic contest is currently running, for the 6th year, under the theme "Africa on the Move"

It should be made clear that the goal of the contest is not limited to collecting freely licenced images to illustrate wikipedia articles (though of course, there is also that...). It is also the opportunity to recruit and train new contributors. It is also the opportunity to promote the wikimedia projects in countries where the awareness can still benefit from improvements. It is also the opportunity for tiny new groups to join the larger community and increase their knowledge of our mouvement. Naturally... this implies that a large part of the photo contest operations usually take place in offline (face-to-face) events (edit-a-thons, photo walks, upload sessions etc.). Which obviously is currently a problem...

So... we have just announced some modifications to the contest rules and operations.

This is due to the global health crisis with all Wikimedia related events being cancelled. And this is due to a context... with rather few cases in most African countries, the population in Africa is currently not following the recent recommandations to practice social distanciation or even to stay at home.

First note that all offline activities are being cancelled as expected. Second, winners ceremonies will be either cancelled (and gifts sent by postal mail to winners) or will be delayed till... later (we recommand to maintain the ceremonies and host them after the crisis is over) The entry deadline for Wiki Loves Africa has been extended to *15th APRIL 2020* to accomodate the following changes : We suggest people to upload already existing, archived, images that are sitting on their hard drives at home. We will also be hosting some ONLINE events and activities to ensure that participants and teams are all supported and can still enter. Bear with us... this will be an experiment ;)

We also decided to urge people to stay at home using the hashtags #StayAtHome https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/stayathome?epa=HASHTAG and #RestezChezVous and hope that this will help local teams further spread this message locally for the sake of all. We have created a bunch of visuals to improve communication in those directions, which will be used in the next few days.

Links * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2020 * https://www.facebook.com/wikilovesafrica/ * https://twitter.com/wikilovesafrica

The team