20 June 2013

Wiki Loves Public Art, an international photographic contest

Wiki Loves Public Art. Photo by Andreas Kamhuber. Attribution CC BY-SA 3.0 AT

Wiki Loves Public Art is an international contest which aims to increase the number of pictures of public art available under free license on WikiCommons, the Wikipedia's multimedia database.

The contest, which started last May, is organized by Wikimedia Sverige in cooperation with Europeana. For this first edition, the countries involved are Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain (Barcelona) and Sweden.

With this initiative, Wikimedia tries to draws attention on the topic of Public Art, while enriching at the same time the WikiCommons database.
Anyway, also a third issue is arised by the contest: the differences in the European copyright's legislations which can make difficult for the public to access and share the Public Art. 

In fact, with Wiki Loves Public Art "we are also trying to raise awareness of copyright laws and the fact that in some countries national legislation can even make you a criminal for taking photos of publicly owned artworks, the same artworks you pass on your way to work or school every day”, states John Andersson, the contest's international coordinator.

The contest is articulated in a two-level competition. First, the pictures uploaded by users will be judged by the national Wikimedia's jury. The best ten pictures from each of the participating countries will then compete in the international contest.

The prizes for the three internationally best pictures – which will be announced in July – are travel gift certificates for 500 euros, 300 euros and 200 euros and on top of that Europeana has sponsored high quality prints of the winning pictures that will be sent to the winners.

Stefano Sbarbati