Hello all,

Hereby I like to announce the project Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.

In November we had a meeting with a museum and we noticed that they were very enthusiastic about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but they experienced it as difficult and maybe dangerous to open up their collection. This relatively closed attitude appears to be not unique, but often occurring among Belgian cultural institutions, compared with other countries, as we understood from various organisations in the open knowledge sector.

Therefore we have thought about how to work together with cultural institutions and we came up with Wiki Loves Art. This project has been organised earlier in various countries, and in 2009 also in the Netherlands. A Dutch team is currently working on organising Wiki Loves Art in 2016 again, and that gave us the inspiration to start with the organisation in Belgium as well.

Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what participants visit the museums, galleries, archives and libraries which have determined a part of their collection to be photographed and published under a free license. Wiki Loves Art gives participating photographers often a unique possibility to take photos in a cultural institution and/or to visit an organisation behind the scenes. This has resulted in other Wiki Loves Art projects in many photos that are widely used on various Wikipedias. For cultural institutions this project gives the opportunity to collaborate with Wikipedia/Wikimedia in a save way, without having opening the doors of their entire collections, and show a part of their collection with relatively little costs.

In an organisational point of view the project is intended to make the Belgiumgap less wide and the availability will increase the coverage of Belgian art on Wikipedia. In comparison with other countries, relatively less articles have been written about subjects in Belgium in the various language versions of Wikipedia. This project tries to stimulate to fill this gap and that Belgian art and more is better visible and described on Wikipedia.

Wiki Loves Art is a project under the flag of Wikimedia Belgium, but is a joint project in what we work together with several organisations with a long-term expertise in working with cultural institutions and/or open knowledge projects. Together with them we had last week a meeting and agreed on how we want to organise Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.

We need to start in time as the project is very labour intensive with much time spend on communication with the various cultural institutions. The Dutch team has therefore highly recommended to hire someone for one or two days a week during the project to be able to manage all the communication and organisational needs. We are also going to set up a website, print flyers and leaflets, and after the contest we organise a jury to judge the photos and organise a prize giving ceremony.

Therefore we created a grant request at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_BE/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016

If there are any suggestions or feedback, please let us know.

The project will be brought in at the General Assembly coming Saturday.

If you are interested in volunteering as part of the organisational team, let us know!

The project page can be found at https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016

Kind regards,

Romaine