Culture Exchange
Culture Exchange is a global initiative led by Wiki Knowledge Park to foster mutual understanding, respect, and collaboration among diverse cultures through Wikimedia projects. This project encourages Wikimedians around the world to document, share, and celebrate cultural heritage, traditions, arts, languages, and lived experiences from communities near and far.
Goals
[edit]- Promote cross-cultural understanding and intercultural dialogue
- Encourage contributions to Wikimedia projects about underrepresented cultures
- Facilitate collaboration between communities, affiliates, and individuals
- Empower contributors to document their own culture and learn about others
- Support Wikimedia’s Movement Strategy goal of Knowledge Equity
Key Activities
[edit]- Organize edit-a-thons and writing contests focused on global cultural topics
- Partner with local and international affiliates for content exchange initiatives
- Facilitate virtual or in-person cultural sharing meetups
- Collect and curate multimedia content (photos, audio, video) via Wikimedia Commons
- Encourage translation and cross-language contributions on cultural topics
- Promote usage of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for documenting intangible cultural heritage
Participation
[edit]Everyone is welcome to participate! You can join in the following ways:
- Contribute articles on culture-related topics from any region of the world
- Translate cultural articles into your native or target language
- Upload images, audio, and videos of cultural practices, festivals, or events
- Help organize local or online edit-a-thons with the Culture Exchange theme
- Connect with another Wikimedia community and run a bilateral exchange project
Themes of Interest
[edit]This project welcomes contributions on (but not limited to):
- Local festivals and rituals
- Traditional foods and recipes
- Clothing and handicrafts
- Oral histories and storytelling
- Cultural expressions in music, dance, and theater
- Cross-border influences and diasporic communities
- Indigenous knowledge systems and customs
Global Rules
[edit]- Communities cannot create or submit articles about their own country, region, or language community.
- Articles must be newly created within the official timeframe of the event. Expansions of old articles are not eligible.
- Each article should be at least 3,500 bytes and at least 300 words in readable prose. (Infoboxes, templates, categories, and references don’t count toward this.)
- Articles must clearly meet the notability (own wiki notability) criteria of the relevant Wikipedia.
- Articles must include reliable sources. Any doubtful or controversial statement must be verifiable by citations in the article.
- Articles must not be purely machine-translated or AI-generated; they should be properly written and copy-edited for clarity.
- If articles are translated, then they must be fully translated (not partial or incomplete translations).
- Articles must not contain major problems (e.g., copyright violations, unverifiable claims, obvious notability issues).
- Editors who repeatedly submit copyright-violating work may be disqualified from receiving awards or ambassador titles.
- Articles should not be list-only pages. They must be proper, informative articles.
- Topics can be from any other participating community’s culture, history, tradition, or society (not one’s own).
- Articles submitted by an organizer must be reviewed and verified by a different organizer.
- Each language community will have its own jury/judges to evaluate whether submitted articles meet the rules.