Hi all, On behalf of the organizing team for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine I’m writing to inform you of our decision not to submit photos for the international round.
Traditionally, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine has been one of the biggest WLM local contests in the world, as well as among the biggest projects supported by Wikimedia Ukraine. This year, Ukraine and subsequently the contest has suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Particularly, for security reasons the organizers had to limit submissions only to photos taken before February 24th, 2022, which is the date when Russia openly invaded Ukraine. Despite the limitations, we managed to organize the contest in 2022 and attract almost 14,000 photos of Ukrainian cultural heritage from almost 300 participants. They illustrate over 5,300 monuments, including 351 monuments depicted for the first time. However, the local organizers will not be submitting Ukrainian photos for the international round because of the international organizers’ decisions to accept photos from Russia on the international stage. To be clear, we do not support this decision and had asked the international team not to accept Russian photos in the international round. While we fully support the spread of free knowledge in various forms, we believe that it is not appropriate to promote on the international level photos from the country that wages a brutal war against Ukraine, kills thousands of Ukrainians – and systematically destroys and steals Ukrainian cultural, architectural and archaeological monuments. Besides, Russia’s war has deprived Ukrainian photos of equal conditions in the competition. While daily life in Russia continues largely as normal, Ukrainian photographers have had to operate in extremely difficult conditions and under many limitations – both the formal ones imposed for security reasons and the overall situation in Ukraine (power blackouts, problems with internet connectivity, personal hardship etc.) Therefore, we cannot accept Ukrainian photos competing alongside Russian ones – we do not think that in current circumstances it is the right thing to announce which Ukrainian photos are better and which are worse than Russian ones. We are grateful to Ukrainian participants and volunteers who have made the contest possible this year against the odds, as well as to international organizers for their hard work in supporting the largest photo contest in the Wikimedia ecosystem. Best regards, Olga Milianovych Member of the organizing committee for Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine (Disclaimer: Antanana is a member of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organizing committee. Due to her currently serving on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees she recused herself from taking part in discussions and making decisions on this topic).
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