Hi all,
On behalf of the organizing team for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine I’m writing to inform you of our decision not to submit photos for the international round.
Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine has been one of the biggest WLM local contests in the world, as well as among the biggest projects supported by Wikimedia Ukraine.
This year, Ukraine and subsequently the contest has suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Particularly, for security reasons the organizers had to limit submissions only to photos taken before February 24th, 2022, which is the date when Russia openly invaded Ukraine.
Despite the limitations, we managed to organize the contest in 2022 and attract almost 14,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage from almost 300 participants. They illustrate over 5,300 monuments, including 351 monuments depicted for the first time.
However, the local organizers will not be submitting Ukrainian photos for the international round because of the international organizers’ decisions to accept photos from Russia on the international stage. To be clear, we do not support this decision and had asked the international team not to accept Russian photos in the international round.
While we fully support the spread of free knowledge in various forms, we believe that it is not appropriate to promote on the international level photos from the country that wages a brutal war against Ukraine, kills thousands of Ukrainians – and systematically destroys and steals Ukrainian cultural, architectural and archaeological monuments.
Besides, Russia’s war has deprived Ukrainian photos of equal conditions in the competition. While daily life in Russia continues largely as normal, Ukrainian photographers have had to operate in extremely difficult conditions and under many limitations – both the formal ones imposed for security reasons and the overall situation in Ukraine (power blackouts, problems with internet connectivity, personal hardship etc.)
Therefore, we cannot accept Ukrainian photos competing alongside Russian ones – we do not think that in current circumstances it is the right thing to announce which Ukrainian photos are better and which are worse than Russian ones.
We are grateful to Ukrainian participants and volunteers who have made the contest possible this year against the odds, as well as to international organizers for their hard work in supporting the largest photo contest in the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Best regards, Olga Milianovych Member of the organizing committee for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine
(Disclaimer: Antanana is a member of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organizing committee. Due to her currently serving on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees she recused herself from taking part in discussions and making decisions on this topic).
I appreciate this and the extraordinary photos of Ukrainian heritage that came out of past years' contests, one of the fruits of which is sitting on my wall.
❤️🩹⚡🌼, SJ
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 10:46 AM Olga Milianovych < olga.milianovych@wikimedia.org.ua> wrote:
Hi all,
On behalf of the organizing team for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine I’m writing to inform you of our decision not to submit photos for the international round.
Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine has been one of the biggest WLM local contests in the world, as well as among the biggest projects supported by Wikimedia Ukraine.
This year, Ukraine and subsequently the contest has suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Particularly, for security reasons the organizers had to limit submissions only to photos taken before February 24th, 2022, which is the date when Russia openly invaded Ukraine.
Despite the limitations, we managed to organize the contest in 2022 and attract almost 14,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage from almost 300 participants. They illustrate over 5,300 monuments, including 351 monuments depicted for the first time.
However, the local organizers will not be submitting Ukrainian photos for the international round because of the international organizers’ decisions to accept photos from Russia on the international stage. To be clear, we do not support this decision and had asked the international team not to accept Russian photos in the international round.
While we fully support the spread of free knowledge in various forms, we believe that it is not appropriate to promote on the international level photos from the country that wages a brutal war against Ukraine, kills thousands of Ukrainians – and systematically destroys and steals Ukrainian cultural, architectural and archaeological monuments.
Besides, Russia’s war has deprived Ukrainian photos of equal conditions in the competition. While daily life in Russia continues largely as normal, Ukrainian photographers have had to operate in extremely difficult conditions and under many limitations – both the formal ones imposed for security reasons and the overall situation in Ukraine (power blackouts, problems with internet connectivity, personal hardship etc.)
Therefore, we cannot accept Ukrainian photos competing alongside Russian ones – we do not think that in current circumstances it is the right thing to announce which Ukrainian photos are better and which are worse than Russian ones.
We are grateful to Ukrainian participants and volunteers who have made the contest possible this year against the odds, as well as to international organizers for their hard work in supporting the largest photo contest in the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Best regards, Olga Milianovych Member of the organizing committee for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine
(Disclaimer: Antanana is a member of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organizing committee. Due to her currently serving on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees she recused herself from taking part in discussions and making decisions on this topic). _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list To unsubscribe send an email to wikilovesmonuments-leave@lists.wikimedia.org http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Olga, thank you for your message, I think it's very important to know the insight of this decision. And at the time when I agree with your decision to not to take responsibility for the risks that are (sadly still) exist for the photographers, I can not agree with your assumption that Wikimedians of Russia "are living normal life". Yes, bombs are not falling onto our homes but we are having risks of other nature that can have same, or even worse consequences. And I'm not talking about mobilization that have already took few of my acquaintances, involuntary. I'm taking about a condition of a society when any person photographing anything in public can be understood by police or even by bystanders as a treat with a very bad result. I, personally, had a very rough conversations with random people on streets during my personal or even our user group photowalks. After the beginning of mobilization I even asked our affiliate members to terminate all of the photographing activities and offline events. I'm talking about an enormous emotional pressure when authorities claim Wikimedia Movement as their enemy and Wikimedians as traitors and a treat to the "only truth". And, adding to that, some of our fellow Wikimedians are trying to treat us bad just because of our citizenship. We can't get any support or appreciation from both our compatriots and people who share our views. We can be claimed as a treat and jailed or even killed in our country in any day and at the same time there are some people in the movement who wants us out. Yes, what happens in Ukraine is a mess (there should be another word for that, but my English is not perfect, so I know only obscene synonyms) and should not happen anywhere and anytime. If I could do more that I've done already to stop that — I'd do it. But don't think that you are the only one struggling. That would be a bit selfish even in these damn conditions. Cultural heritage topic was always aside of world politics and I hoped this time it would stay the same. Keeping in mind number of losses of Ukrainian heritage monuments I think that work made by Wikimedia community on photodocumenting them and maintenancing the database is one of the coolest thing humanity made so far. And all we've done in WLM along the years was dedicated to that. I hope that this horrible actions of a part of a Russian society will not intervene our productive work on that field. -- Sorry if I've offended someone. Nikolai Bulykin (User:Красный) North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group четверг, 15 декабря 2022г., 02:44 +06:00 от Olga Milianovych olga.milianovych@wikimedia.org.ua :
Hi all,
On behalf of the organizing team for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine I’m writing to inform you of our decision not to submit photos for the international round.
Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine has been one of the biggest WLM local contests in the world, as well as among the biggest projects supported by Wikimedia Ukraine.
This year, Ukraine and subsequently the contest has suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Particularly, for security reasons the organizers had to limit submissions only to photos taken before February 24th, 2022, which is the date when Russia openly invaded Ukraine.
Despite the limitations, we managed to organize the contest in 2022 and attract almost 14,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage from almost 300 participants. They illustrate over 5,300 monuments, including 351 monuments depicted for the first time.
However, the local organizers will not be submitting Ukrainian photos for the international round because of the international organizers’ decisions to accept photos from Russia on the international stage. To be clear, we do not support this decision and had asked the international team not to accept Russian photos in the international round.
While we fully support the spread of free knowledge in various forms, we believe that it is not appropriate to promote on the international level photos from the country that wages a brutal war against Ukraine, kills thousands of Ukrainians – and systematically destroys and steals Ukrainian cultural, architectural and archaeological monuments.
Besides, Russia’s war has deprived Ukrainian photos of equal conditions in the competition. While daily life in Russia continues largely as normal, Ukrainian photographers have had to operate in extremely difficult conditions and under many limitations – both the formal ones imposed for security reasons and the overall situation in Ukraine (power blackouts, problems with internet connectivity, personal hardship etc.)
Therefore, we cannot accept Ukrainian photos competing alongside Russian ones – we do not think that in current circumstances it is the right thing to announce which Ukrainian photos are better and which are worse than Russian ones.
We are grateful to Ukrainian participants and volunteers who have made the contest possible this year against the odds, as well as to international organizers for their hard work in supporting the largest photo contest in the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Best regards, Olga Milianovych Member of the organizing committee for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine
(Disclaimer: Antanana is a member of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organizing committee. Due to her currently serving on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees she recused herself from taking part in discussions and making decisions on this topic). _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Sometimes there are no good options.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Коля Красный via Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org] Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2022 00:12 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Cc: Коля Красный Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Decision of WLM in Ukraine organizers not to submit photos for the international round
Olga, thank you for your message, I think it's very important to know the insight of this decision.
And at the time when I agree with your decision to not to take responsibility for the risks that are (sadly still) exist for the photographers, I can not agree with your assumption that Wikimedians of Russia "are living normal life".
Yes, bombs are not falling onto our homes but we are having risks of other nature that can have same, or even worse consequences. And I'm not talking about mobilization that have already took few of my acquaintances, involuntary. I'm taking about a condition of a society when any person photographing anything in public can be understood by police or even by bystanders as a treat with a very bad result. I, personally, had a very rough conversations with random people on streets during my personal or even our user group photowalks. After the beginning of mobilization I even asked our affiliate members to terminate all of the photographing activities and offline events.
I'm talking about an enormous emotional pressure when authorities claim Wikimedia Movement as their enemy and Wikimedians as traitors and a treat to the "only truth". And, adding to that, some of our fellow Wikimedians are trying to treat us bad just because of our citizenship.
We can't get any support or appreciation from both our compatriots and people who share our views. We can be claimed as a treat and jailed or even killed in our country in any day and at the same time there are some people in the movement who wants us out.
Yes, what happens in Ukraine is a mess (there should be another word for that, but my English is not perfect, so I know only obscene synonyms) and should not happen anywhere and anytime. If I could do more that I've done already to stop that — I'd do it. But don't think that you are the only one struggling. That would be a bit selfish even in these damn conditions.
Cultural heritage topic was always aside of world politics and I hoped this time it would stay the same. Keeping in mind number of losses of Ukrainian heritage monuments I think that work made by Wikimedia community on photodocumenting them and maintenancing the database is one of the coolest thing humanity made so far. And all we've done in WLM along the years was dedicated to that. I hope that this horrible actions of a part of a Russian society will not intervene our productive work on that field.
-- Sorry if I've offended someone. Nikolai Bulykin (User:Красный) North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group
четверг, 15 декабря 2022г., 02:44 +06:00 от Olga Milianovych olga.milianovych@wikimedia.org.ua:
Hi all,
On behalf of the organizing team for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine I’m writing to inform you of our decision not to submit photos for the international round.
Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine has been one of the biggest WLM local contests in the world, as well as among the biggest projects supported by Wikimedia Ukraine.
This year, Ukraine and subsequently the contest has suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Particularly, for security reasons the organizers had to limit submissions only to photos taken before February 24th, 2022, which is the date when Russia openly invaded Ukraine.
Despite the limitations, we managed to organize the contest in 2022 and attract almost 14,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage from almost 300 participants. They illustrate over 5,300 monuments, including 351 monuments depicted for the first time.
However, the local organizers will not be submitting Ukrainian photos for the international round because of the international organizers’ decisions to accept photos from Russia on the international stage. To be clear, we do not support this decision and had asked the international team not to accept Russian photos in the international round.
While we fully support the spread of free knowledge in various forms, we believe that it is not appropriate to promote on the international level photos from the country that wages a brutal war against Ukraine, kills thousands of Ukrainians – and systematically destroys and steals Ukrainian cultural, architectural and archaeological monuments.
Besides, Russia’s war has deprived Ukrainian photos of equal conditions in the competition. While daily life in Russia continues largely as normal, Ukrainian photographers have had to operate in extremely difficult conditions and under many limitations – both the formal ones imposed for security reasons and the overall situation in Ukraine (power blackouts, problems with internet connectivity, personal hardship etc.)
Therefore, we cannot accept Ukrainian photos competing alongside Russian ones – we do not think that in current circumstances it is the right thing to announce which Ukrainian photos are better and which are worse than Russian ones.
We are grateful to Ukrainian participants and volunteers who have made the contest possible this year against the odds, as well as to international organizers for their hard work in supporting the largest photo contest in the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Best regards,
Olga Milianovych
Member of the organizing committee for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine
(Disclaimer: Antanana is a member of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organizing committee. Due to her currently serving on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees she recused herself from taking part in discussions and making decisions on this topic).
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Dear Olga and WLM Ukraine - your work is impressive and your efforts to bring visibility and point to issues with WLM in 2022 are also.
I can empathize with the feeling one gets when others are benevolent to recognize and act on what seems obvious *(as someone who experienced war aggression in all of my homelands, first SFR Yugoslavia, then Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina. I do agree that the WLM 2022 international team should not process Russian photos in a competitive way against Ukrainians and I wish this was raised as an issue more publicly. WLM had issues also before with inertia and no capacity and/or good will to recognize problems on national levels. Here I agree with Peter on* no good options *but this is no excuse for not exploring good-enough or better-than options!
I am hopeful that your work will sustain and that soon enough you will inform and inspire systemic change in Wikimedia. Meanwhile I hope WMF can practically support your work at least with material resources to reduce some of the hardships.
In solidarity - Z. Blace
Dear Olga,
Thank you for your explanations, it is good to hear about them on this list. I wish you all the best for the Wikimedia work in Ukraine. I understand that I, compared to most people in Ukraine and Russia, live in very, very favorable circumstances. However, I feel that some statements in this thread are disturbing and inapproriate: * "Yes, bombs are not falling onto our homes but we are having risks of other nature that can have same, or even worse consequences." * "But don't think that you are the only one struggling. That would be a bit selfish even in these damn conditions." Given the situation, and given the actual news from Ukraine, the crimes against humanity, I'd wish that these statements had not been made. I also read: * "Cultural heritage topic was always aside of world politics and I hoped this time it would stay the same." Kolja himself mentions the destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage that is going on now. And it does not need much googling to learn that destroying buildings, stealing art, burning books etc. - and killing the people linked to a culture - is very much part of "world politics". Olga, as I said, I wish you all the best for your Wikimedia work in Ukraine, and beyond.
Kind regards, Ziko
Am Do., 15. Dez. 2022 um 08:59 Uhr schrieb Željko Blaće zblace@mi2.hr:
Dear Olga and WLM Ukraine - your work is impressive and your efforts to bring visibility and point to issues with WLM in 2022 are also.
I can empathize with the feeling one gets when others are benevolent to recognize and act on what seems obvious *(as someone who experienced war aggression in all of my homelands, first SFR Yugoslavia, then Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina. I do agree that the WLM 2022 international team should not process Russian photos in a competitive way against Ukrainians and I wish this was raised as an issue more publicly. WLM had issues also before with inertia and no capacity and/or good will to recognize problems on national levels. Here I agree with Peter on no good options but this is no excuse for not exploring good-enough or better-than options!
I am hopeful that your work will sustain and that soon enough you will inform and inspire systemic change in Wikimedia. Meanwhile I hope WMF can practically support your work at least with material resources to reduce some of the hardships.
In solidarity - Z. Blace _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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