Dearest Indian Wikimedians,
We are extremely happy to announce that West Bengal Wikimedians User Group
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/West_Bengal_Wikimedians> is going to
organize the prestigious Wiki Loves Monuments
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2020>
photo-competition at the national level
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2020_in_India>
this September again for the third consecutive year. India is going to
participate in the event for the 7th time. Like before, User:Sumitsurai
will be leading our organizing team.
Special thanks to the utmost dedication of our incredible volunteers from
the team as well as from the community at large, for the last 3 years, we
have been steadily increasing the monument data on Wikidata using it as a
central database and almost the entire list
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2020_in_India/Monuments>
is now automatically fetched from there.
Earlier, we have also planned to move beyond ASI and state protected
monuments, and this year we are including Gandhi Heritage Sites, Heritage
Inventory of Indian Railways and Heritages of Portuguese Influence located
in different states and UTs of India. We are also including local
designated sites like the Heritage sites declared by West Bengal Heritage
Commission and Kolkata Municipal Corporation graded buildings. We are
expecting to completely add these data before the competition starts.
We are also aware that the designated monuments by different agencies are
just the tip of the iceberg. We have innumerable monuments from every part
of the country, which are very little or not documented at all, many are
ignored or on the verge of collapse or destruction due to various reasons.
However, we have very limited capacity in our team, but our audacious
ambition is to include as many of them as possible, if not all. For the
last 3 years, the user group has been running cost-effective dedicated
programs to digitally document these monuments, at least in West Bengal and
we have plans to include them in WLM sooner or later.
This year, we have also increased the prize money by around 20% from last
year and included some in-kind prizes too. From the feedback we received
from the participants, we have decided to send certificates to the winners.
Our team has requested
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Requests#Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2020_in_India>
CIS-A2K to support the event financially and help us send those prizes to
the winners.
We are currently finishing last month preparations, cleaning and adding
more and more monument data, talking with potential jury members, creating
promotional banners etc.
Expecting your best wishes and active participation from September 1.
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
Volunteer organizer,
On behalf of the entire WLM India team