Guinness recognized Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 as the world's largest what?

Guinness recognized Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 as the world’s largest photography competition. The record referred to the number of photographs submitted during that year’s international contest, not to the size of a heritage database or the number of Wikipedia edits.

The event began as a Netherlands pilot in 2010, but expanded in 2011 to 18 European countries. Participants photographed protected monuments and uploaded the images to Wikimedia Commons, where they could be freely reused. The 2011 competition generated roughly 168,000 uploaded pictures from more than 5,000 photographers, establishing its record-setting scale.

That achievement helped transform Wiki Loves Monuments from a local experiment into a global Wikimedia tradition. In 2012, participation expanded beyond Europe to 35 countries, with hundreds of thousands more images submitted. A common mix-up is to treat the contest as an editing marathon: its defining activity is photography, while the resulting media supports encyclopedia articles and cultural documentation.