The Wiki Exploration Program is a field exploration project which was initiated by the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group in 2017 from the need to document the lesser-known and rarely visited heritage sites in West Bengal and later has been extended to other parts of India as well since 2023. There have been 33 phases of this program till date and as a member of the user group, I have planned and participated actively in almost all of them.
The different phases of this program have been funded by the Wikimedia Foundation majorly through different Rapid Fund phases since long. The user group supports a small team consisting of travel bloggers, amateur and professional photographers and drone operators, to conduct the exploration phases.
West Bengal has a plethora of heritage structures, some of which are not present on the internet at large as well and the photographs taken under this program serves as the only available images of those buildings for many of them. These images can be of immense help while writing an article on Wikipedia. It may not be irrelevant to mention here quite a few such monuments documented by the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group cease to exist at present and these photographs are the only evidence of them. Through this program, we have documented almost 85% of the built heritage of West Bengal.
In the year 2024-2025, we photo documented 100 different heritage structures each located in the districts of Cooch Behar and Nadia of West Bengal, where near about 100 places in each district has been covered. Most of these structures were declared as heritage sites by West Bengal Heritage Commission.
In this year, we have also explored heritage structures located outside of West Bengal by venturing into the documented Aurangabad district in the state of Maharashtra and the remote northern part of Sikkim. While planning, we had realized that other than rarely visited heritage sites; popular sites are also not systematically documented on Wikimedia Commons, so we had decided to included some well-known heritage sites in the list, including the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Ajanta and Ellora caves.
Till now, around 40,000 images have been uploaded through this program since 2017. During the last 6 months, these photographs have drawn 5 million views on different Wikimedia projects.
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