As many as 70 people, including 20 students, participated in the ‘Wiki Takes The City’ walk organised by Wikimedia Foundation and captured glimpses of the city; 197 photographs of the city were uploaded on Wikipedia website within two hours of the event
A group of amateur photographers, decked up in woollens and armed with their cameras, set out to capture glimpses of the city on Tuesday morning. They had gathered at Gandhi Ashram for the ‘Wiki Takes The City’ walk organised by Wikimedia Foundation, which had invited Amdavadis to take photographs of the city. The selected photographs will be uploaded on Wikipedia.
The walk witnessed participation from 70 people, including 20 school students. Then the participants dispersed in their respective groups to three locations — Walled city, Gujarat University area and ISRO area. The walk concluded at 1 pm after which the participants had to upload their best photographs.
197 pictures, two hours
Noopur Raval, coordinator of Wikimedia India Chapter, said, “As many as 197 photographs were uploaded within two hours of the event. Every participant was sent on a route that had ten monuments. Hence, we expected around 50 photos to be clicked by each of them.”
Like Maulik Joshi and Abhishek Joshi, both software engineers, many participants had taken a leave from work to participate in the event. Maulik, who was in the group that took pictures of Gujarat University area, said, “This is an attempt to portray best of Ahmedabad through photographs.”
Agreed Maulik, “Photography is my passion. It feels great to be part of such events wherein we get a chance to show the real Ahmedabad to the world with our photos. We also got to capture nooks and corners of the city which we had never noticed earlier.”
Platform to meet
Twenty-year-old Bijal Parikh, who is pursuing graphic designing in Ahmedabad, said, “It is a great platform to meet new people who have a passion for photography. I have clicked more than 100 photos and they are people-centric. Since they would be uploaded on Wikipedia, I clicked photos which people can connect to.”
She added, “Many youngsters participated in the walk. This shows that we youngsters are concerned about our heritage, monuments and the city itself.”
Encourage people
The aim was to encourage people to take photographs of as many local sites and city specific objects of cultural heritage as possible for Wikipedia articles, according to an information on ‘Wikipedia Takes Ahmedabad’ page.