Inaugural Monuments of Spain Challenge completed

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Albacete monuments have been added to more than a dozen Wikipedias.
“Pasaje Lodares” by Chowdon, under Public Domain

In October 2014, Wikimedia España ran the Monuments of Spain Challenge. This contest takes profit from our Wiki Loves Monuments experience in order to spread the knowledge of Spanish culture –mainly architectural in this case- around the World.

Spain is a multicultural country, with eight different languages present in the Wikimedia Projects: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Extremaduran, Catalan, Galician, Occitan and Castilian Spanish. It is also the cradle of a language with a global presence: Spanish. So we in Wikimedia España felt the need to expose ourselves to a multilingual world, and have tried to make our contest known in 145 languages.

Just saying thanks took some effort
“Nota agradecimiento MoSC” by A. Barra, under CC BY-SA 3.0

Participants in the Challenge were asked to edit –create, translate or expand- articles about monuments. This is an idea we borrowed from Wikimedia Sverige, with some influence of contests by Amical Catalan language group and Welsh Wikipedia. We are very grateful to them, as their experiences helped our team address different issues along the way.

The results of the Challenge have been encouraging. There have been 2079 articles edited, corresponding to approximately 1086 different Wikidata items in 37 languages, from Guarani and Korean to Welsh and Malay. We are particularly proud about the Awadhi and Maithili edits, which are still in the Incubator. All together, 46 people participated in the edits.

The winners were users Alphama in the general category, and Rauletemunoz in the languages of Spain special contest. Alphama completed edits almost entirely in Vietnamese, and Rauletemunoz did so in Catalan. Some editors used seven, nine or even eleven different languages.

We started this endeavor with the best intentions, but little practical knowledge. This has been a rewarding experience, as it improved our organization and helped us learn more about contests, monuments, people, and languages. We have had the help of many people we did not expect to work with, and our knowledge of communities within the Movement has grown too.

This has been just a step and we are willing to take more. We have learned, I said, so the next one will be different. Our goal is still to improve.

User:B25es, Wikimedia España

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Congrats on such a successful project! It’s great to see writing contests in coordination with WLM. Hopefully other groups can learn from your experience!