You may remember the Wiki Loves Monuments, the annual photography competition that has been taking place in Pakistan for the last three years.
This year’s competition was supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a California-based nonprofit organisation that runs Wikipedia, for the third time. It is also supported by Flickr and Unesco through its Unite4Heritage campaign, launched to create a global movement to safeguard heritage.
The competition aims to improve illustrations in Wikipedia articles about Pakistani cultural and historically significant properties and thus the best entries have been picked .
It helps preserve the world’s cultural heritage sites by encouraging people to take their photographs and upload them to Wikipedia under a free license, as opposed to traditional all-rights reserved, meaning that the photographs can be reused, as long as the reuser attributes the photographer.
The eight annual global contest, held this year, saw a total of 245,000 uploads to Wikipedia. 10,000 different people from 52 countries participated to upload photographs during the contest.
From Pakistan, over 270 contestants participated from across the country and submitted more than 1,900 photographs.
Pakistan became a part of the Wiki Loves Monuments in 2014. Since then, 1,500 people have submitted 260,000 photographs to Wikipedia.
Pakistan achieved the third spot amongst the 42 participating nations in the 2016 edition of the competition.
The international winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 are yet to be announced, but the top 10 pictures to represent Pakistan as decided by Pakistan’s jury are below:
