Frequently Asked Questions

Wiki Loves Monuments is the world’s largest photography competition. Its goal is to document cultural heritage by photographing monuments and uploading the images to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, so everyone can access them. This site is the Turkey edition of the campaign.

It lets you find historic monuments near you on the map, take their photos, and upload them straight to Wikimedia Commons in a few taps. Your photos become part of an open archive of Turkey’s cultural heritage.

No. Participation is open to everyone and requires no payment. You can upload photos all year round, not just during the competition period.

Because photos are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in your name, a Wikimedia account is required. Sign-in happens through Wikimedia’s own secure system (OAuth); we never see or store your password.

You can sign up here in a couple of minutes, then come back and log in.

Yes. Your password never reaches this site. Wikimedia handles the login, and only with your consent grants permission to upload photos on your behalf. You can revoke this permission from your Wikimedia account at any time.

You can upload photos you took yourself that clearly show the monument. The photo must be your own work, with no one else’s copyright on it.

No. You may only upload photos you took yourself. Images found online or belonging to others constitute copyright infringement and will be deleted from Commons.

Your photos are published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. This means anyone can use your photo by attributing you and sharing under the same license. This license cannot be revoked, so make sure you accept it before uploading.

Content uploaded to Wikimedia Commons becomes part of a permanent archive and cannot be freely deleted. Deletion is only possible within the framework of Commons’ deletion policy. So please be careful before uploading.

Your photo’s EXIF data, such as date and location, may be used to match it with the correct monument and pre-fill upload details. This data is transferred to Commons along with the photo; if you prefer, you can strip the EXIF data before uploading.

The monuments on the map, along with their locations and details, come from the free knowledge base Wikidata. The site regularly syncs this data with Wikidata.

Because monument data comes from Wikidata, missing or incorrect details are fixed on Wikidata itself. Wikidata is an open database anyone can contribute to; corrections made there will appear here after a while.

Of course. New photos from different angles, seasons, or showing different details are always valuable and enrich the archive.

Your photo appears in the relevant monument’s category on Wikimedia Commons and on the Recent photos page of this site.

Your photo is uploaded to Wikimedia Commons instantly. Appearing on this site depends on a short sync: it usually shows in the monument’s gallery and on the “Recent photos” page within a few minutes, and at most 15 minutes. If you set a photo as the monument’s main image (Wikidata P18): when done through this app the main image updates instantly, but if you set it manually on Wikidata it can take up to a day to appear as the main image on the map.

It can be. Because it is freely licensed, your photo may be used with attribution in Wikipedia articles, other Wikimedia projects, and indeed anywhere in the world.

First check your internet connection and that you are logged in. If the problem persists, refresh the page and try again; temporary load on Wikimedia servers can sometimes slow uploads.

Yes. The site is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, and its source code is publicly available on GitLab.

You can share your questions, feedback, and suggestions via the Wiki Loves Monuments in Turkey page on Commons.