Hi all,

below a first draft - the piece about Italy is still missing. I think we have a nice diversity this way! It's cramming a bit more, so lets see how this works out.

Best,

Lodewijk

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Wiki Loves Monuments was organised for the sixth time in 2015, and has now collected well over a million photos of monuments across the world. There are major differences in the national approaches towards cultural heritage, and volunteers organising the competition face different challenges across the world. Sometimes is getting the lists of monuments the main challenge, other times it is a legal, cultural or geographical challenge. We hope to continue spreading enthusiasm for free knowledge and cultural heritage across the world, and make information about cultural heritage available across the world.

Russia – Russia faces major challenges in its internal diversity and vast geographic distances. Last year, Russian organizers boosted geographical coverage by launching a separate prize for the maximum number of visited regions. Two participants traveled each thousands of kilometers through the whole country to cover 30 of Russia’s 81 regions, from the Amber Coast to the Pacific Coast and from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. One of the winners, Evgeny Lazarev, told us that his 1298 photos were an outcome of his frequent traveling by car over the last 6 years.

Italy - ...

Netherlands – The country where Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010 has over 60.000 recognised national monuments. After four photo competitions and the wonderful donation of hundreds of thousands of photos by the cultural heritage agency, many monuments have a free photo available. What to photograph next?

The next challenge was in municipal monuments, with one slight problem: each municipality is responsible for determining and maintaining their list. While some municipality publish proudly lists of their local heritage, others have have not recognised local heritage, or are even reluctant to share the lists. After many phone calls and emails, volunteers managed to gather a unique database of Dutch municipal monuments with more than 80% of the municipalities covered.

(Article by Lodewijk Gelauff, Alexander Tsirlin, Federico Leva)

POSSIBLE PHOTOS:

(Russia)