Eleven years of leading photography projects for Wikipedia

The document summarizes eleven years of experience of Mr. Jan Lochman in managing and administering grant projects supporting volunteers in documentary photography for Wikipedia. In 2019, Mr. Lochman was successful in his grant application for a project to photograph production processes and acquire scientific photographs at the Wikimedia Foundation. After a year, Wikimedia Czech Republic consolidated the project with another documentation project into the larger Mediagrant project, which ensured the supply of photographs of Czech settlements, protected areas, monuments, ponds and waterways, industrial processes and events to Wikipedia for the next ten years. Thanks to this work, Mr. Lochman became familiar with managing volunteer processes, assessing grant calls, creating grant applications, and the basics of accounting and IT project management. The experience gained from uploading photos to the Wikimedia Commons repository and reviewing volunteers' work led him to conclude that photography is an essential carrier of information. Therefore, every country should have its own repository of freely available photographs of places and events. Some countries, such as Poland or Hungary, have such repositories; others do not. At the end of this document, Mr. Lochman offers guidance on accessing such a repository.