Commons:Wiki Loves Earth 2020/COVID19 response

Wiki Loves Earth 2020

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The global spread of COVID-19 pandemic has some impact on the activities related to Wiki Loves Earth 2020, and the aim of this page is to provide advice to local teams on how to deal with the outbreak of coronavirus in the light of the contest.

You can learn more about the coronavirus spread at the WHO site.

Cancellation of offline events

Please note that all offline public events funded by Wikimedia Foundation grants must be canceled or postponed until further notice, and new events should not be planned. Thus, if your Wiki Loves Earth contest is funded by a rapid grant or another grant from the WMF (e.g. simple APG), you should not include any offline public events in your applications, and you should cancel all public events already planned.

Events funded by your sponsors/partners or the ones that do not require any funding can be held, but please respect all relevant limitations imposed in your country. We recommend you NOT to organize any in-person public events until the world health situation gets better. Still, online activities should not be directly affected by the pandemic, and you can encourage participants to dig through their archives of photos not uploaded to Commons yet.

Advice on fostering online activities for WLE

Some specific advice on how to handle the situation includes:

• award ceremonies should be either postponed (please note that large in-person events are unlikely to be held in the nearest future) or moved to online. In the latter case, any physical prizes/gifts/certificates should be sent by post or replaced by online prizes, such as gift cards for online shops
• events on increasing contributions (edit-a-thons, upload sessions, public presentations, etc.) should be held online. You may request funds for online platforms or online promotion if needed (rapid grants can fund temporary subscription services for video conferencing, expenses for temporary wired or wireless data plans etc.) and overall put more effort into online outreach. As outlined above, offline events for general public cannot be funded by WMF for this year's contest edition.
• group travels such as expeditions or photo walks cannot be funded by the WMF and, generally, should not be organized this year. Please advise participants to use their existing photos and increase online outreach to photography communities instead. Long-distance travels should be discouraged — please advise participants to focus on documenting local natural sites in their area (e.g. within cycling distance from their home) instead.
• you may also encourage and give incentives to other activities, which are related to the contest indirectly and can be done from home; such as improving Wikipedia, Wikivoyage or Wikidata content on natural sites, getting permissions on images published online by others, or using pictures from previous years to illustrate Wikimedia projects in different languages.

  For some advice on which activities to hold, see an article in Wiki Loves Earth blog: How to make Wiki Loves Earth photos visible on Wikipedia: Experience of Sweden and other countries.