I’m the 2019 Illustrator Owl winner🤩

The three winners of the WikiUilen who were present at the New Year’s gathering of Wikimedia Netherlands:
Vera, Daniëlle Jansen (Wiki goes Caribbean project) and Hanno Lans (SchrijversUil).
Photo: Quistnix, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I am proud to share that I have received the 2019 WikiUil from the Dutch Wikipedia community in the “illustration” category. I was nominated for this because I have uploaded nearly 70,000 media files to Wikimedia Commons, which includes over 5,500 photos I’ve made myself of monumental buildings, well-known people, and other sights. Wikimedia Commons is Wikipedia’s sister project where freely licensed images are stored. For instance, you can find complete catalogs of painters whose work has entered the public domain.

My main contribution to Wikimedia Commons last year was 480 photos of Dutch senators and members of parliament from the period 1901–1913 that have fallen into the public domain. I found these in a series of booklets published by the Rotterdam-based publisher Nijgh & Van Ditmar. Each installment in this series generally followed the same setup: a photo on the left with the biography on the right, first the parliamentarians and then the senators.

It is unsurprising that the men in these booklets were predominantly elite: universal suffrage for men was only introduced at the end of 1917, and for women even later, in 1922. Personally, I’m quite relieved not to live in a time when half the parliament carried a noble title.

By now, more than 130 Wikipedia articles about bearded white men contain a photo from this collection.

Read about the other award winners (in Dutch)

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