TL;DR: 'Wiki Loves Bangla' is a new yearly photo competition organized by Bangla WikiMoitree (a wikimedia thematic network and aspiring hub) aimed to reduce the content gap regarding Bangla Culture and Heritage. Competition result links are at bottom of this email.
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People of Bengali ethnicity live all around the world, but the majority of the population live in Bangladesh and India. Bengali Wikimedians from all over the world have been enriching the Wikimedia projects in the Bangla language hand-in-hand for the past two decades.
In 2022, the longest-running Wikimedia project Bangla Wikipedia turned 18. To celebrate the 18 years of sustained collaboration between Bangla Wikimedians, the Wikimedia Bangladesh Chapter https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh and West Bengal Wikimedians User Group https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/West_Bengal_Wikimedians of India had decided to designate this long relationship as a formal collaboration network and named it "Bangla WikiMoitree https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bangla_WikiMoitree/en." Later "Bangla WikiMoitree" was categorised as a Wikimedia thematic network and aspiring hub for Bengali culture and language.
Despite Bangla being the 5th most spoken language and Bengalis being the third-largest ethnic group (est. population of 300 mil in 2023), we have a significant content gap about Bangla Culture and Heritage in Wikimedia projects.
In the 3rd in-person meeting of "Bangla WikiMoitree" (held in Singapore during Wikimania 2023) we agreed that more organised and long-term work is needed to reduce this content gap. So we started planning to design a program, named "Bangla Culture and Heritage Collation Program" (in Bangla, "বাংলা সংস্কৃতি ও ঐতিহ্য সংরক্ষণ কর্মসূচি").
In January 2024, we launched the 1st flagship project under this program, "Wiki Loves Bangla https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Bangla_2024/en" ( in Bangla, "বাংলার প্রেমে উইকি").
Wiki Loves Bangla is an annual international photography competition around Bangla culture and heritage. This competition will be held yearly on a different theme each year. The subject of the first edition was Bengali Food and Cuisine, which aimed to highlight the diversity of Bengali cuisine by improving the quality and quantity of images of Bengali food available around the world.
In this edition, the contest attracted significant participation with over 2,100 images of Bengali food and culture from 212 participants, reflecting the enthusiastic engagement with the initiative. We believe this competition has substantially enriched Wikimedia Commons with a wealth of Bengali food photos, which will greatly enhance the illustration of Wikipedia articles in the future.
You can check the top 10 winning photos on commons: https://w.wiki/9XAb or on the official website: https://wikilovesbangla.org/galleries/ .
ধন্যবাদ। (Thank You.)
On behalf of Bangla WikiMoitree-
Shabab Mustafa
[User:Tarunno]