Dearest Indian Wikimedians,

We are extremely happy to announce that West Bengal Wikimedians User Group is going to organize the prestigious Wiki Loves Monuments photo-competition at the national level 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 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 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