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World War I edit-a-thons/press release

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Writing about World War I on Wikipedia

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– so that we all can learn from our history –

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To remember and write about the First World War volunteers around Europe and in Australia will on Saturday the 29th of June 2013 take part in edit-a-thons and online events that aim at improving the coverage of World War I on the world’s largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia. An edit-a-thon is an event where people come together to write new and expand existing Wikipedia articles in a language of their choice. The events are organized by the Wikimedia movement together with Europeana as well as local museums and other partners.

World War I started in the end of July 1914 and next year we will remember the 100th anniversary of this world shaking event. At times like these, the sixth largest website in the world, Wikipedia, always experiences a spike in visitors for the articles on the topic at hand. To bring the WWI articles to a good quality these edit-a-thons will be very valuable.

“We will also have at our use material from Europeana's enormous WWI portal, so that we can add amazing pictures to the articles that we are working on. This really adds tons of value to the articles that we have on Wikipedia”, explains the coordinator of the edit-a-thons John Andersson from Wikimedia Sverige.

The goal with the edit-a-thons is, on top of making Wikipedia better, to get new people and new organizations involved in the work that the Wikimedia movement is doing.

“This is a great way to make connections between Wikimedia and local museums as well as between Wikimedia chapters in different countries. We want to show how far we have reached since that time and how much that have changed and is possible through modern technology”, states John Andersson.

Edit-a-thons will take place in five countries: Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In Greece there will be online events organized. When participating to the event (either in real life or online) participants are also competing for great prices as part of a contest called Europeana Challenge. The winners are judged based on a point-system where more and longer additions of text will result in higher points.

Contact the international coordinator if you have any further inquiries:

John Andersson, Wikimedia Sverige
Phone: +46 (0)733965189
Email: john.anderssonwikimedia.se

For additional Information, see the international website for the edit-a-thons: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_edit-a-thons

and the website for the related Europeana Challenge: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_edit-a-thons/Europeana_Challenge/Welcome_to_the_Challenge.


Wikimedia is the movement behind Wikipedia, supporting the same goals on realizing a world where all knowledge is freely available for every human being. This is possible through the US-based Wikimedia Foundation and a network of national associations called chapters which co-operate closely with the volunteers on the Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia.

Wikipedia and the related sites operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 500 million unique visitors per month, making them the 6th most popular web property world-wide. Available in more than 280 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 23 million articles contributed by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Europeana brings together the digitized content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 26 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 2,200 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 29 European languages. Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission. See also Europeana’s website at www.europeana.eu. Contact person for Europeana regarding the cooperation is Geer Oskam, geer.oskam@kb.nl.