Wiki Loves Monuments: Top 10 pictures from Pakistan
You may remember the Wiki Loves Monuments annual photography competition that has been taking place in Pakistan for the last two years.
This year's competition was supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a California-based nonprofit organisation that runs Wikipedia, for the third time. It is also supported by Unesco through its Unite4Heritage campaign, launched to create a global movement to safeguard heritage.
Pakistan became the country with the seventh-largest number of submissions and participants, as 370 photographers participated and 11,000 photographs were submitted (70 per cent of them by Ibn-e-Azhar, an MBA graduate). For the global 2016 edition, 10,500 contestants from 43 countries submitted 265,000 photos throughout the month of September.
The competition aims to improve illustrations in Wikipedia articles about Pakistani cultural and historically significant properties. It helps preserve the world's cultural heritage sites by encouraging people to take their photographs and upload them to Wikipedia under a free license.
The international winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2016 are yet to be announced, but the top 10 pictures to represent Pakistan as decided by Pakistan’s jury are below:
The writer is a volunteer Wikipedia editor and representative of Wikimedia affiliate in Pakistan.
He can be reached at saqib.qayyum@hotmail.com. And tweets @saqibq_