Projekt:Europeana Awareness 2012/WWI Edit-a-thon (2012)

Background

An editathon that will work as a pilot for a possible series of editathons in 2013 will take place in Sweden in November.

To prepare for this event we uploaded pictures on Wikimedia Commons from Europeana's portal regarding WWI. The pictures were used as a base for an editathon with a slogan that roughly translates to "Come and tell us the stories behind these pictures!", i.e. the goal of the editathon was to contextualize them. In Sweden the editathon had university students participating, voluntarily and after class. We did this together with the Humanistiska föreningen på Stockholms universitet and they let us use their facilities for the event and helped us reach out to the students. A special focus for this event was on the students taking history classes at Stockholm university. To reach out to the students and other interested people we put up posters and went to the classes to tell the students about the editathon and had an active presence on social media and blog about the event. In the beginning of the editathon we gave a very short presentation on how to edit and afterwards people started right away with writing articles. Participation for the event was also possible online.

On a Wikipedia page we created a gallery and connected the pictures with a few suggested articles that the participants should create or expand, and in which the picture then could be included as an illustration (see here). The plan was to have 2-4 volunteers present to help the students with practical issues. At the same time there was also a week long online contest on Wikipedia to "help the newbies", so that syntax errors, categories etc. would be fixed right away and that the students can experience the best of Wikipedia and our community, and hopefully fall in love with it. All the participants also had a chance of winning a small prize (a gift card to buy student literature).

Date

The editathon took place on the 7th of November (so that our articles would look good for Remembrance Day, on Sunday the 11th of November) for 5 hours between 16.00-21.00 o'clock.

Facility

At Humanistiska föreningen's house Gula Villan.

Partcipation

The goal was to have around 10-25 people attending the editathon as more people could make it messy and hard to have a productive and stimulating environment. In the end 13 people participated.

PR and Dissemination of Results

PR before the event: We handed out circa 200 fliers and put up more than 40 posters at Stockholm University with information about the event and the logotypes of the three participating organizations. We created an event page on Wikipedia with the poster as an illustration and Europeana (with links) were mentioned frequently on the page. One magazine wrote about the event in their online issue.

PR after the event: We wrote a lessons learned report and blogged about the event.

Dissemination of Results: We created all the necessary material and the structure for the Swedish editathon to test the concept. This way we would get a lot of editathons with Europeana’s material, on top of the other planned events, with a limited amount of extra work. This could be scaled up to a larger thing to get better press coverage, and we could contact for example Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Netherlands etc. to see if they would be interested to participate and organize editathons in parallel during the same date that we suggest (Wikimedia France has already been contacted). This could either be done in cooperation with universities or with GLAMs. We suggest that this will take place on the 28th of June (to celebrate the end of the war); but are open for any other suggestion for good dates.

Connection to Europeana

Pictures from Europeana’s portal will be used as the base for the editathon and will illustrate the articles written. We will tell the students about the cooperation in the beginning and Europeana’s logo will be clearly visible on the promotion material.