One week of Wiki Loves Monuments

Almost one week passed from the start of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest (there are still a few hours until the end of the day) and people are submitting photos with historical monuments from their countries to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and more. So far it looks good.

On the world level, the stats are good, the uploads as I write are over 47,000 images (my guesstimate: they will close to 50.000 by the end of the day/first week), poised to reach a total of the month that will set the contest as the world's biggest (passing the last year numbers, which made Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 the biggest photography contest so far). Of course, is not all roses: unfortunately a few countries backed-down at the last minute, so WLM happens in *only* 32 countries (still not bad).

On a national level Romania is not doing bad either, we reached 1000 pictures in less than one week and joined this select club (there are countries that reached this milestone after the first weekend, hats off to them!), a performance which took almost two weeks next year. The number of people contributing is 65, which is also not bad, unfortunately most of them are still at under 5 images. They may grow.

On a personal level, even if as an organizer I won't qualify for any prize, I still want to add my photos. My strategy was different this year: I uploaded my bulk of images, standing in the queue for a while, from the first days, to kickstart the contributions. And there were quite a few of them, at 365 images giving my "15 minutes of glory", for a short while I was one of the top dozen contributors worldwide. Also at the moment my pictures are one third of the Romanian uploads, but my uploads slowed-down (if I want to post more pics, I have to shoot them first), other people will have to step up. I am confident this will happen.