For the past few month we have been diligently preparing the list of sights included in the competition. As you may recall, Israel has no one official list. We could not go to one website and get the information from it. We approached the Society for Heritage Sites which provided us with many lists – in each a list of names of buildings or sites, and it was for our volunteers to locate the site, figure out its address, and whether there is a category in commons or an article in Wikipedia about it (under the name provided by us – or, more commonly when such article or category exists – under another name).
We were also working on publicizing the project, giving interviews to newspapers about the competition and preparing newspaper articles for the holiday seasons in which we suggested sites for people to visit during the upcoming holiday season.
As part of our cooperation with the Heritage society we demanded that they not only give us funding for the project, but also give us weekly guided tours of heritage sites around the country (we requested at least four tours every weekend in different parts of the country). These tours will be open to the public free of charge (we require that people sign up in advance through the competition website – and agree the be part of the Wikimedia Israel GLAM mailing list in the future).
The society further agreed that any active wikipedian who wish to visit a heritage site which has enterance fees, will be allowed into the site free of charge, and so will be his family members (again - registration in advance is required, so we can ensure it is in fact an active wikipedian who requests the free tickets).
We also contacted the biggest photography school in Israel – the Galitz school and ask them to give, as sponsorship, free photography workshops on two weekends prior to the competition. They agreed to give such workshops for 120 participants and these two workshops will be also open to the public free of charge.
A list of all our activities can be seen here (truly badly translated by google):
Deror