Wednesday 10 December 2014

Learning WIkipedia

This month at The Dowse we've officially launched a summer Wikipedia project, researching and adding biographical entries for New Zealand craft/applied art artists to the site.

We've learned a lot already, and we're going to be regularly blogging about the project. I didn't expect to be very hands-on with the project - in fact, I was quite scared of the Wikipedia culture and frankly have been avoiding it for years now.

However, I've been sucked in, and over the last few weekends I've found myself diligently at my laptop, doing battle with rules around notability and wiki mark-up to create and edit pages. There's a real satisfaction to creating something that 30 or 40 minutes ago didn't exist - putting Alan Preston or Tanya Ashken or Manos Nathan into a place where I feel they belong - and more importantly, a place where they become more discoverable to the world.

If you want to follow progress - or join in! - there's also a scratchpad on Wikipedia itself you can review and add to.

No comments: