How to participate in Wiki Loves Africa: general steps
TUTORIAL: How to use the upload wizard to submit a picture
1. Take photos!
This is the fun part! You can enter media (photos, video clips or audio files) that visually or sonically represent the theme. Think of rare and unusual ways of looking at the theme items we might take for granted around us.
For tips and trick in how to take a good quality image for Commons, take a look at these guidelines:
Your media could go onto Wikipedia to illustrate an article. Choose photos and media where the subject matter is clear and in focus. Please do not select dozen near-identical pictures of the same topic!
Enter your photographs using this link to go directly to the upload page. Remember to describe the photo and add relevant categories to the image. NOTE: to be eligible for national prizes please make sure you use the dropdown in the upload wizard to select the country the image was taken in.
Better describe the images or add your photos to the relevant article on Wikipedia in your language. Full webinar on the topic
If you see that a subject that you are passionate about is not yet on Wikipedia, then you might want to consider writing an article about that subject.
Whilst participants mostly upload pictures, other files, such as audio and video, are welcome.
For videos, please only submit files in the following formats:
.ogg
.ogv
.webm
Due to complex intellectual property rights issues, Wikimedia Commons can not accept video content that is submitted in any other format.
It is recommended by the Wiki Loves Africa team that you used an off-Wiki conversion tool, such as Handbrake to convert your file to either a .webm format, before uploading the video using the Upload Wizard. It is suggested that you upload video content one video at a time.
For more information, there is a helpful how to guide on how to convert video media into these formats can be found here on Wikimedia.
IF you use one of the Wikimedia-based conversion tools, such as Video2commons, then a separate upload process (separate from the upload wizard) is used. If this is the case, you MUST include these two categories when you enter the file details during the process. The two categories are Videos from Wiki Loves Africa 2022 and Images from Wiki Loves Africa 2022 in [your country] otherwise we won't know that you have uploaded them!
VideoCutTool helps users to edit videos in commons and also converts MP4 videos on the user's device to Wikimedia Commons accepted formats. VideoCutTool is also available as a gadget in Wikimedia Commons, You can turn it on from Preferences -> Gadgets -> Check on VideoCutTool -> Save! (i.e
WebM/OGV) and upload/re-upload them to Commons on-the-fly [1].
Wikimedia uses Creative Commons licences. Find out more about these licences in this video.
When you upload an image from the contest page, the CC BY SA 4.0 license will be automatically applied. If you want to choose another license, consider reading Commons:First steps/License selection for more insight.
How to upload many images at the same time?
The best tool to do that is Pattypan. Check out Commons:Pattypan.
How to contact the OTRS team to give license permission?
When and how to contact OTRS - full video tutorial in English. Also view on Vimeo.
After you upload a picture, you may be contacted by a commonist who will ask you to submit an OTRS ticket, which is essentially sending an email to document the fact you are the author of this image. There is a tutorial to explain you how to do that: Category:When and how to contact OTRS (video tutorial)
ISA is a fun, multilingual, mobile-first 'microcontributions' tool, that makes it easy for (groups of inexperienced) people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.
With ISA, you can choose a pre-defined set of images on Commons and then ask contributors to 'tag' these with multilingual structured metadata. Points are counted for each contribution, and therefore it is possible to organize 'tagging' or microcontributions competitions or challenges with ISA. More info on the Commons:ISA Tool.
Additionally, a drive is organized every year (around September-December) to improve the description of all images collected during the previous Wiki Loves Africa.Check out Commons:ISA Tool/Wiki Loves Africa MetaData Weeks.
How to nominate a picture for featured pictures?
Featured picture candidates are images that the community will vote on, to determine whether or not they will be highlighted as some of the finest on Commons. This page lists the candidates to become featured pictures. The picture of the day images are selected from featured pictures. Check out: Commons:Featured picture candidates.
