Wiki Loves Monuments comes to a close

A couple of days left, Wiki Loves Monuments has already harvested many, many good pictures for… Wikipedia? No, for everybody. The mark of 110,000 pictures has been reached, and maybe they will be 150,000 by September 30th. One can expect a last rush at the last day.

We learned that all 111 monuments of Andorra has a picture, that the young daughter of Achim Raschka might be the youngest contributor of all, that the Polish have organized expeditions to the less populated parts of their country. I hope that later we will have a nice handbook with good practices and some anecdotes.

Like those about the German authorities and their incapabilities (at large) to provide good lists of monuments. Many were dated, some even hand written…

 

Leonardo Award in Cologne

Prize organizers and prize winners in Cologne (picture: Franz Pfluegl, CC-BY-SA)

Last week I have been in Cologne for the Leonardo Award for European Corporate Learning. The organizing committee, consisting of people from science and economics, considered Jimmy Wales to be a perfect prize winner (first and only previous winner was Jacques Delors, former EU commission president). In contrast to M. Delors, Jimmy Wales did not come, and he was represented by Wikipedians Denis Barthel (DE), Nando Stöcklin (CH) and me (DE/NL).

The echo, of course, was not as loud as if  Jimmy had shown up. But people were nice to us and we three completed each other in the performances well.

In general, the attendees came from the world of enterprises and were mainly interested in benefits for corporations, and it was not always easy to find a useful answer to their questions. We felt being quite foreign in this environment, but didn’t regret to come at all. Maybe one or the other contact will bring fruits.