World War I edit-a-thons 2014

For the events in 2013, see: World War I edit-a-thons 2013.

A poster designed for the pilot WWI edit-a-thon in Stockholm, Sweden, that took place in 2012.

A series of World War I edit-a-thons will be organised in parallel at the same date, on WHEN???, to remember World War I. The goal is to increase the quality of our articles and to expand our coverage of the conflict on the different language versions of Wikipedia. The initiative to these events was taken by Wikimedia Sverige and any chapter, thematic organisation or other organisation that is interested in improving Wikipedia's coverage of the War are welcome to take part. You do it your way but we hope that we all can help each other out! Share your ideas and expertise and don't hesitate to ask for help. Together we can make something really spectacular!

Europeana is an old partner to our movement and we think that it would be nice if we could include material from Europeana's enormous WWI portal (europeana1914-1918.eu) into the events (we have uploaded a bunch of pictures already).

Also, feel free to translate this page into your language!

Why are we doing this?

1. As you perhaps already know there are always a spike in the amount of visitors around the dates when a major event has taken place, and we want Wikipedia's articles to be as good as possible before that. It's gonna be a crazy amount of things happening in 2014, so we better be ready!
2. An edit-a-thon is a perfect event to cooperate with different GLAMs and engage experts! On the European level we are already cooperating with Europeana and through their network we will encourage GLAMs to help us out by uploading their hidden gems before the contest and help us connect the pictures to suitable articles and in other ways support the edit-a-thons.
3. We want to increase the use of Europeana's enormous digital collection on Wikipedia and make the community aware of this partnership and the many similarities between our two organisations. Europeana has many thousands of pictures connected to WWI with the right licenses of which many are suitable to use on Wikipedia. The pictures come both from the public and from their vast European GLAM network. We can show the GLAM network why they should use a truly free license (suitable for Wikipedia) and what the end users can do.
4. Finally, we hope that a series of events across borders will spawn a lot of great press coverage and really show the collaborative strength of our international community.

When, where and how?

The event will take place on WHEN???. The date is chosen as PRESENT ARGUMENTS WHY THE DATE IS SUITABLE.

We hope that chapters and volunteers will organise edit-a-thons in as many countries as possible to better describe the conflict. It would be especially cool if all of the countries that were at war would participate in these parallel edit-a-thons to show the new modern Europe. Together we should really try to find a good way to cooperate across the borders both before, during and after the event. Please suggest ways of achieving that goal on the discussion page.

We hope to organise the edit-a-thons together with GLAMs or universities to get experts involved. If you are thinking what institutions that you could cooperate with in Europe, this site might come in handy.

As part of the preparations, and as a base for suggesting articles that need some extra love, we have and will continue to upload a large number of pictures from Europeana 1914-1918 to Wikimedia Commons and connect them to suitable articles (see below). You can help!

In 2012, Wikimedia Sverige organised a pilot event to prepare for this and develop some best practices. You can find the lessons learned page here, a blog post about the event (in Swedish and English) as well as a blog post on Europeana's blog.

In 2013 volunteers and Wikimedia staff in seven countries manage to coordinate events on the same day, June 29!

Participating countries

Wikimedia Sverige AND??? will help coordinate the efforts. Please sign up below if you are interested in organizing an event in your country and write shortly about what you will be working on at the subpage (all countries in the list have volunteers that have stated that they will work on at least one event in the country).

When you click on a link to a page that hasn't been created yet there will be a template appearing that you can fill out. The information in the template is needed for the reporting that Wikimedia Sverige has to do, so we really appreciate if you take the time! You can of course add other things as well. See World War I edit-a-thons/Sweden for an example.

• Sweden
• Serbia - even though repeating this year's editathon would be nice (and June 28 2014 is a Saturday, which is great), I think we could benefit more from an earlier date. We'll try to organize several events leading up to June 2014 in Serbia. --FiliP ██ 22:26, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
• Netherlands
• Switzerland, 2014-06-21, @federal archive bern.
• Germany
• France : illustrating French Wikipedia with WWI pictures from the Toulouse archives and more.

Countries contacted that might participate (in alphabetical order)

If you are planning to organizing something and your country is listed here, please move them up to the list above and fill out the template.

• I guess we could do something here at the Dutch National Library and National Archive, provided it could before the end of my Wikipedian-in-Residence time (july 2014). Furthermore, we're located at 100 meters from the main offices of Europeana, so that might come in handy :) Husky (talk) 13:58, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Resources for event organizers

Red poppy, symbol of the dead in Flanders.

If you are new at organizing edit-a-thons but still would like to give it a go, these resources might come in handy. Contact John at john.anderssonwikimedia.se for further assistance.

Meetup event pages

• A press release have been drafted for the event: World War I edit-a-thons/press release.
• Wikipedia:Meetup – Includes details on developing your event and how to create a meetup page.
• Edit-a-thon How-To – if you're interested in running a successful edit-a-thon.

Promoting your event

• Wikipedia:Geonotice – A geonotice is a banner that pops up at the top of Wikipedia based on where you live (like the donation banners!). Request a geonotice for areas around your region and Wikipedians in those areas will learn about your event!
• Finding users in your area to invite – Check out the event pages for past meetups in your area and invite those users on their talk pages.
• Wikipedians by location – Invite users based on where they live - It's easy to do this by exploring who has what types of userboxes on their pages.
• Wikimedia mailing lists – Promote your event through mailing lists for those interested in Wikimedia projects. There are mailing lists for regions around the world and specific interests.

Giveaways and support

• Wikimedia chapters – Visit this link to learn more about your local chapter.

On top of support from Wikimedia Sverige, many local chapters are available for financial and promotional support! Ask your local chapter how they can help today!

Timeline

This is a timeline to help you with the planning and make it possible to coordinate the efforts. If you are interested in organize an event or otherwise help out, please indicate so on this page or write on the talk page.

Thing to do	Dates
Start contact the GLAMs	As soon as possible! GLAMs work slowly.
Indicate that you or someone from your chapter will organize an event by adding your country to the list	Before WHEN???
Have a subpage up about the event (who, where, what, focus, needs)	Before WHEN???
Have press releases about the events to local, regional and national media sent out	WHEN???
The edit-a-thons take place!	WHEN???
Count the points	WHEN???
Prize to the winner of the Europeana Challenge is sent out	WHEN???
The national teams adds any press and blog mentions of the event(s) here	WHEN???