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Looking Back at Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025
As we get closer to the next Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Iran, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the 2025 edition.
A year has passed since photographers across Iran once again took part in Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. The 2025 edition was organized by the Iranian Wikimedians User Group, with the help of volunteers and members of the Wikimedia community. The competition invited people to photograph Iranβs registered cultural and historical monuments and share their images freely on Wikimedia Commons.
We now have some distance from the competition and its results. This gives us a good chance to look at what happened, what we learned, and what we want to take with us into the next edition.
Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025
The Iranian competition ran from 1 to 31 October 2025.
During that month, participants contributed 2,513 eligible photographs. In comparison, the 2024 competition received 2,722 eligible photographs.
This was a small decrease, but the number of uploads tells only part of the story.
Iran has more than 33,000 registered monuments, spread across the country. Some are famous and already have many photographs. Others are much less known, and many still need better documentation on Wikimedia projects.
The goal of Wiki Loves Monuments is not simply to collect as many photographs as possible. We want to create a useful and freely available visual record of cultural heritage. A good photograph can illustrate a Wikipedia article, help people learn about a monument, or preserve a view of a place that may change in the future.
This was also an important lesson from our 2024 competition. Each edition helps us understand a little better how we can improve the contest and how we can encourage people to document more of Iranβs cultural heritage.
Selecting Iranβs finalists
After the competition ended, the national jury reviewed the photographs and selected the ten images that would represent Iran in the international round.
The first-place photograph showed Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, photographed by Hossein Pourakbarian.
Second place went to Mohammad Ataei for a photograph of the historic district of Gorgan, and third place went to Hadi Dehghanpour for a photograph of Arak Bazaar.
The ten selected photographs covered different parts of Iranβs heritage. They included caravanserais, historic urban areas, mosques, a bazaar, a castle, a monastery and other monuments.
These ten photographs then moved on to the international stage of Wiki Loves Monuments.
An exceptional international result
The 2025 international competition brought together photographs from 56 national contests. In total, almost 228,000 images were contributed by around 4,000 photographers around the world. Each national competition could send up to ten photographs to the international round.
The final result was especially memorable for Iran.
Four photographs from Iran were selected among the international winners, including both first and second place.
The Iranian winners were:
- 1st place: Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, by Hossein pourakbarian
- 2nd place: Mehmandust Tower, by Mehdi Akbari
- 5th place: Arak Bazaar, by Hadi Dehghanpour
- 22nd place: Seyyed Mosque in Isfahan, by Siavash Banaei
The full international results are available on Wikimedia Commons.
Seeing an Iranian photograph take first place was already something to celebrate. Having photographs from Iran in both first and second place made the result even more special.
The first-place photograph of Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai had also won first place in the Iranian competition. It was chosen as the best image first by the national jury and later by the international jury.
But another result was just as interesting for us.
The photograph of Mehmandust Tower, which finished second internationally, had been ranked sixth in the Iranian competition.
This is a good example of why each country sends ten photographs to the international round instead of only its national winner. Different juries can see different strengths in a photograph. An image that places sixth in one jury may become one of the strongest photographs in the international competition.
The same happened, to a smaller degree, with other Iranian finalists. The photograph of Arak Bazaar was third nationally and fifth internationally. The photograph of Seyyed Mosque was fourth nationally and later finished 22nd in the international results.
For us, this showed the strength of the national top ten as a group, not only the strength of the first-place photograph.
More than the winning photographs
The international results were a great achievement for the photographers and for Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. But the winning images are only a small part of what the competition produced.
The 2,513 eligible photographs from the Iranian competition are now part of Wikimedia Commons.
They are freely licensed. They can be used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. They can also be reused outside Wikimedia by anyone who follows the terms of their licenses.
Many of these photographs will never win an award, but that does not make them less useful.
A clear photograph of a little-known monument can be more valuable to Wikipedia than another beautiful photograph of a landmark that already has hundreds of images. A photograph can also document a building, detail, landscape or condition that may not look the same ten or twenty years from now.
This is one of the reasons Wiki Loves Monuments continues to matter.
What we learned from 2025
Looking back, one lesson is clear: the success of Wiki Loves Monuments cannot be measured only by the number of uploads.
Iran received fewer eligible photographs in 2025 than in 2024, with 2,513 compared with 2,722. At the same time, the photographs selected by the national jury had an exceptional result internationally.
This does not mean that the number of contributions is unimportant. We still want more people to take part, and we want to document more monuments. But we also want to help participants create photographs that are useful for Wikimedia projects.
The international results also reminded us of the importance of having a strong and varied national selection. The ten photographs sent to the international round should represent different photographers, places, styles and ways of looking at cultural heritage.
Another important goal is to encourage more photography of less-documented monuments.
With more than 33,000 registered monuments in Iran, there is still a great deal of work to do. Famous places naturally attract photographers, but Wiki Loves Monuments can have an even greater long-term impact when participants visit places that have few photographs or no useful images on Wikimedia Commons.
We also want to keep making the connection between photography and open knowledge clearer.
Uploading a photograph is an important first step. Correctly identifying the monument, adding useful information, using the right monument ID, and eventually adding the photograph to Wikipedia articles can make that contribution much more useful.
Looking toward the next edition
As the next Wiki Loves Monuments Iran approaches, we want to build on what we learned from both 2024 and 2025.
We want to reach new photographers while welcoming returning participants. We want to encourage people to explore monuments that receive less attention. We want more high-quality photographs, but also more photographs that fill real gaps in Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.
Most of all, we want to continue building a free visual record of Iranβs cultural heritage.
The international success of the 2025 competition gave us something special to celebrate. Four Iranian photographs were among the international winners. Two of them took the first and second places in the world.
But the lasting result of the competition is much bigger than four photographs.
It is the thousands of freely licensed images that are now available to everyone.
The Iranian Wikimedians User Group would like to thank every photographer who participated, the members of the national jury, the volunteers who helped organize the competition, and the international Wiki Loves Monuments community.
As we prepare for the next edition, we hope even more people will join us in photographing, documenting and sharing Iranβs cultural heritage.
There are more than 33,000 monuments to document.
There is still a lot to photograph.
