The Wiki Loves Africa photographic contest is currently running, for the
6th year, under the theme "Africa on the Move"
It should be made clear that the goal of the contest is not limited to
collecting freely licenced images to illustrate wikipedia articles
(though of course, there is also that...). It is also the opportunity to
recruit and train new contributors. It is also the opportunity to
promote the wikimedia projects in countries where the awareness can
still benefit from improvements. It is also the opportunity for tiny new
groups to join the larger community and increase their knowledge of our
mouvement.
Naturally... this implies that a large part of the photo contest
operations usually take place in offline (face-to-face) events
(edit-a-thons, photo walks, upload sessions etc.). Which obviously is
currently a problem...
So... we have just announced some modifications to the contest rules and
operations.
This is due to the global health crisis with all Wikimedia related
events being cancelled.
And this is due to a context... with rather few cases in most African
countries, the population in Africa is currently not following the
recent recommandations to practice social distanciation or even to stay
at home.
First note that all offline activities are being cancelled as expected.
Second, winners ceremonies will be either cancelled (and gifts sent by
postal mail to winners) or will be delayed till... later (we recommand
to maintain the ceremonies and host them after the crisis is over)
The entry deadline for Wiki Loves Africa has been extended to *15th
APRIL 2020* to accomodate the following changes :
We suggest people to upload already existing, archived, images that are
sitting on their hard drives at home.
We will also be hosting some ONLINE events and activities to ensure that
participants and teams are all supported and can still enter. Bear with
us... this will be an experiment ;)
We also decided to urge people to stay at home using the hashtags
#StayAtHome <https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/stayathome?epa=HASHTAG>
and #RestezChezVous and hope that this will help local teams further
spread this message locally for the sake of all.
We have created a bunch of visuals to improve communication in those
directions, which will be used in the next few days.
Links
*
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2020
*
https://www.facebook.com/wikilovesafrica/
*
https://twitter.com/wikilovesafrica
The team