Indian photographs had reached the international finals of the Wiki Science Competition before, in 2017, 2019 and 2023. But India had never run its own national edition. In May 2025 a call went out asking Wikimedians to organise the competition in their countries. I said yes.
Ten months later, the first national edition had brought 3,706 scientific images from 474 contributors to Wikimedia Commons. I served as National Lead. This is the story of how it came together, the parts I built, and the parts I would do differently.
Website: wikisciencecompetition.in
Commons page: Wiki Science Competition 2025 in India
Results: Results and winning entries
Announcement on Diff: India Joins the Global Race
From an email to a programme
On 18 June 2025 I wrote to the international organisers. On 27 June we met and went through what a national edition requires: categories, outreach, judging, finalist nominations and a schedule. The Commons Photographers User Group joined as a collaborating affiliate in early July.
The difficult part was not the decision. It was turning a competition format into something that could run end to end: receive submissions, guide participants, judge fairly, recognise winners, and hand finalists to the international round. We had about four months from decision to launch, so everything ran in parallel: Meta-Wiki and Commons pages, the website, upload campaigns, outreach, sponsorship and the jury plan.
Building the team
By the end of July 2025 we had a 13-member core organising team and an orientation call. Over the following months the network grew to more than 18 Campus Ambassadors across India, who took the competition into colleges and science departments that had never heard of Wikimedia Commons.
From September we held weekly Saturday calls, with notes and recordings kept so that nobody needed to have attended every call to know what had been decided. That habit sounds administrative. In a distributed volunteer team, it is the difference between a shared programme and a set of private conversations.
A website that talks to Commons
The part I am proudest of is the website, which I designed and built myself in Next.js and TypeScript. I did not want a static page that someone would have to update by hand every evening. So it reads directly from Commons.
Live galleries and upload totals come from the Commons API.
A live leaderboard pages through the competition category, up to 500 files per request, and counts uploads per contributor.
English and Hindi run through the whole site, backed by a translation dictionary of more than a thousand lines, because many of the students and teachers we wanted to reach are more comfortable in Hindi.
A self-service certificate generator lets a participant type their Wikimedia username. The site counts their eligible uploads on Commons, and if they have 20 or more, it generates a PDF certificate and can email it.
That last feature saved the team from checking hundreds of accounts by hand. The general lesson: when a task repeats and the data already exists on a Wikimedia project, automate the task instead of asking volunteers to repeat it.
The code is MIT-licensed so that future editions, in India or elsewhere, can reuse it.
Two tracks, so a phone is enough
Science photography can sound like it needs a microscope and a DSLR. We ran two upload campaigns, one for mobile and one for camera. The mobile track meant a student with a phone could compete fairly, judged against other phone photographs rather than against professional equipment.
Uploads ran from 1 November to 15 December 2025. AI-generated images were not eligible, and every entry needed a real description and a free licence.
Teaching people to upload well
We ran two Commons workshops. The first, on 5 October 2025, covered uploading, categories and copyright basics, with 57 registrations. The second, on 26 November with support from the Commons Photographers User Group, focused on what makes a scientific image useful: a precise description, correct categories and metadata, not only an attractive picture.
I think of those workshops as part of the competition's output. A participant who learns to describe and categorise an image properly will do it on every upload after the competition too.
Judging
The national jury had six members from India, the United States and Nigeria, in two panels of three, one per track. We ran it on Montage in two rounds: yes/no screening, then star ratings.
The first round took two weeks longer than planned, because of tool glitches, first-time jurors learning the interface, and the volume of entries. A final jury review on 14 February 2026 checked the consolidated results before publication. On 5 March 2026 the results went live on Commons and India's top entries were submitted to the international round. Strong entries were also nominated for Quality Image review.
After the results
This is the part I feel most strongly about. Many photo campaigns effectively end once the winners are announced. The images sit in a category and wait for someone to find them.
I have kept going back to the competition category to find images that genuinely improve Wikipedia articles, and adding them where they belong. A photograph of laboratory equipment, a specimen or an astronomical object does its real work when it appears in the article a student is reading. Winning matters to the photographer. Being used matters to the reader.
Done without a Wikimedia grant
The whole edition ran without a Wikimedia grant. The prize fund was INR 22,000 in gift vouchers, raised through sponsorship and organiser support. That works out to roughly INR 6 per uploaded image.
I do not want to present that as cheap. It excludes hundreds of hours of volunteer time, which is never free for the people giving it. But it does show how much infrastructure a committed volunteer team can build with very little money.
What I would change
Start six months before launch, not four. Parallel work under time pressure left no room for anything to slip.
Announce prizes before uploads open. Students told us they commit more when they know the incentive in advance, even a modest one.
Recruit jurors early and run a test round in the jury tool before real judging begins.
Use proper bulk email infrastructure for press. Some of our bilingual press emails bounced.
Give Campus Ambassadors small, concrete tasks and a light reporting routine. Recruitment alone does not keep people active.
What it left behind
Thousands of freely licensed scientific images now cover subjects that were thin on Commons: laboratory equipment, specimens, astronomy, biodiversity, medicine. A website and certificate tool that others can reuse. And 474 contributors who know how to put a well-described scientific image on Commons.
The complete timeline and every link are in my Wiki Science Competition 2025 India logbook.