Hi everyone,

A quick update for the rules and process this year.

Deadlines: As usual, Wiki Loves Monuments will take place in the month of September. If your country would like to request exception to the usual competition days (1-30 September), please get in touch with the international team through wlm-global-org@lists.wmnederland.nl . The deadline for submitting nominees to the international jury is, as usual, 31 October.

We have updated our international rules https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/jury/. In the past years, we have encountered a few instances of high scoring images that did not have email address confirmed. This creates an enormous amount of extra work, and uncertainty. We request that all national teams check that their nominees have a confirmed email address for the author at the time of submission. If the photographer does not have their email address confirmed, we will likely disqualify the image at some point in the process. Please emphasize this in the competition pages. The international team will not commit to chasing/reminding winners or organizers of this. (if someone is willing & able to run a bot to check this during the competition, and alert the owner and the organizer, that would be great).

This year, we have a Special Award for European Heritage because of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. This Special Award is kindly sponsored by the German National Committee for Heritage Protection. More information about this, will appear o https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/awards/n our website.

We had some discussion earlier about what the best approach to the competition is from the point of view what defines a 'country' on the international jury level. While this is inherently a messy definition (we're putting the United States and Andorra at the same level, after all), the international team decided to opt for the following interim working definition: - UN memberstate (UNESCO definition) is the basis from which we work - we can optionally derive from that on a case by case basis 1) if it is de facto a separate country, including international diplomacy and heritage policy, and could be UN-memberstate if not for international conflicts etc (examples: Taiwan, Kosovo, etc) 2) if there is a significant 'distance' with a component of the country that makes it for traveling purposes a different country. Examples: overseas territories, Hong Kong etc. - if there is minor overlap between two participating countries, the photo can participate in any country where it is registered as such (border conflicts etc) - a country will never be considered with separate submissions to the finale if there is (near) full overlap with another participating national competition, if it fits exception 2). This to avoid double participation of images. In the case of exception 1), it will be considered on a case by case basis. - The international jury coordinator (as representative for the international team and the jury) makes this decision.

To be clear: it is always OK to 'combine' a few countries into a single national competition for practical reasons.

Sorry for the longish email - this is all for now!

Best, Lodewijk