In this paper we describe GikiCLEF, the first evaluation contest that, to our knowledge, was specifically designed to expose and investigate cultural and linguistic issues involved in multimedia collections and searching, and which was organized under the scope of CLEF 2009. We present the task, its motivation, the results of the participants and the GIRA resource that is offered to the community for training and further evaluating systems with the topics gathered. We end the paper with some discussion of what we learned and possible ways to reuse the data.