Hundreds of photos from the Eurovision Song Contest made available for free on Wikipedia

ESC2014_-_Austria_02_conchita_wurst

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the largest international TV events with an estimated 125 million viewers annually in 56 countries. In spite of this, there are very few photos from the contest available for free use on for example Wikipedia.

To show the Wikipedia community that it was possible to cover a major event and share quality images for common use, Swedish photographer Albin Olsson took advantage of the fact that last year’s final took place in his home country Sweden. He uploaded 870 images and videos from the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 with a Creative Commons license to Wikimedia.

This year as the Eurovision was hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark, Olsson continued and extended his project. He spent two weeks prior to the event covering press conferences and rehearsals. There are now more than 900 photos and video files uploaded to Wikimedia by Olsson, free for usage under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

Find all photos taken by Albin Olsson during the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 here.

Footnote: Image of winner Conchita Wurst above by Albin Olsson (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Via @ernstpoulsen