Uploading for the contest ended on October 1, 2012. Contributions from 2,013 photographers were uploaded, totaling 22,133 photographs in the US. Exactly 30 photographers each contributed 100 or more photos in the US. We are still placing photos in our county lists, but about 4,500 photos were for sites that were not previously photographed for our lists. Worldwide, 15,006 photographers contributed 360,652 photos in 36 countries, which makes this, by far, the world’s largest photo contest. All we can do is say

Thank you so very much!

Please remember that you can still contribute to Wikimedia Commons. Just upload your photos directly to Commons. You won’t win the $700 prize, but you will likely get something even better. You’ll be able to see your photos in the articles and lists on Wikipedia. If you take a bit of time to learn how to edit, you can even put them there yourself. Of course, do please be careful that you don’t delete a better photo from the list or article, and that you don’t overload the article with pictures.

About the contest

Wiki Loves Monuments USA 2012 was a photo contest on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons that ran throughout September, 2012. It is part of an international Wiki Loves Monuments competition organized by the Wikimedia Community in 36 countries. In the U.S., the contest focused on sites on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), which have been organized on Wikipedia by state and county.

Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge Wikipedia collects and disseminates. To improve the number and quality of photos of historic monuments and places, the Wikipedia community started a photo contest in the Netherlands in 2010, which resulted in 12,500 freely licensed images of monuments that can now be used in Wikipedia, or by anybody for any purpose. In 2011, 18 countries participated in the contest, which resulted in 5,000 participants submitting more than 165,000 images. If you have any questions about the contest, leave a comment here.

The State Office Building at Spring Garden and Broad Streets, Philadelphia (CC-BY-SA)

If you follow our suggestion and work through the the WikiProject:NRHP map and tables, you should be able to find the addresses and geographic coordinates of historical sites.

But sometimes it’s just not easy finding the right building. Sometimes they just don’t look like a building on the National Register of Historic Places.  This building from the 1950s had me fooled for over a year.  I took some great photos of a nice white building from the 1890s that you can just see in the lower right hand corner.

Then a colleague at WikiProject:NRHP came along and removed that photo from the list of Philadelphia NRHP sites and left me a shocking note: not THIS building!

Sometimes you just have to keep on trying.

Note that, like several other regulars at WP:NRHP, I donate all the photos that I upload to Wikimedia Commons, including this one, to the public domain. You can give me a credit line if you’d like, but you don’t have to.

I’m not sure why some of the others donate their photos to the public domain, but I feel that these buildings are part of our shared national heritage, and that I shouldn’t pretend to own even a small piece of them.

When you upload your photos during the contest your photos will be automatically licensed CC-BY-SA.  That means that anybody can use them for any reason, but they have to give you a credit line.  You can change the license of your photos to public domain if you’d like.  During the upload process, just select CC0 as the license.  But this is absolutely not needed.  Just stick with the automatic CC-BY-SA and that will be great.

–Smallbones