World War I edit-a-thons 2013

For the events in 2014, see: World War I edit-a-thons 2014.

Red poppy, symbol of the dead in Flanders

For the Europeana Challenge that is an integrated part of these events, please click here.

A series of World War I edit-a-thons will be organised all over Europe and Australia in parallel at the same date, on Saturday June 29, 2013, 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 as part of the Europeana Awareness project and we ask the national teams to try their best to find good ways of including material from Europeana's enormous WWI portal (europeana1914-1918.eu) into your events (we have uploaded a bunch of pictures already). You can write articles about World War I in any language version that you would like! To give all participants an extra boost to work extra hard we have organized the Europeana Challenge. In this Challenge the participant with the highest point will receive a travel cheque worth 300 euros! Perhaps the money can help you come to Wikimania?

Why are we doing this?

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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.
An edit-a-thon is a perfect event to cooperate with different GLAMs and engage experts! This gives us a chance to approach the GLAMs and initiate cooperations in order for them to release pictures and work with us in other ways during 2014. 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.
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.
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?

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The event will take place on Saturday the June 29th. The date is chosen as the week around that date is filled with central events connected to WWI. For example on the the 28 June Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke which led to the WWI. Also, on that date the Second Balkan War started. We hope that by organizing it during the weekend as many as possible of our volunteers will be able to participate. This will also help get our articles in good shape before the spike of visitors around the 28th of July, when the WWI started.

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. Thanks to an ongoing cooperation with Europeana,^[1] which is very eager to help out with initiating new cooperations between GLAMs and Wikimedia Chapters, we hope to be able to help the organizers in the different countries to reach the right GLAM people to talk to, without to much work. 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 uploading a large number of pictures from Europeana 1914-1918^[2] 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 ^[3] (in Swedish and English) as well as a blog post on Europeana's blog.^[4]

Participating countries

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Wikimedia Sverige 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.

Countries contacted that might participate (in alphabetical order)

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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.

Austria Please click the link and fill out the template with information about your event.
France Please click the link and fill out the template with information about your event.
Switzerland Please click the link and fill out the template with information about your event.

Resources for event organizers

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If you are new at organizing edit-a-thons but still would like to give it a go, these resources might come in handy.^[5] Contact John at john.andersson wikimedia.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

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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.
Upload pictures from Europeana	~25 May (we need your help!)
Indicate that you or someone from your chapter will organize an event by adding your country to the list	Before 14 June
Have a subpage up about the event (who, where, what, focus, needs)	Before 17 June
Have press releases about the events to local, regional and national media sent out	22 June
The edit-a-thons take place!	29 June
Count the points	29 June-6 July
Prize to the winner of the Europeana Challenge is sent out	12 July
The national teams adds any press and blog mentions of the event(s) here	12 July

Articles to work on

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A list of articles that we should work on, in addition to any unfinished work from the 2012 World War I Editathon.

Article	Country	Work needed/Comment
Field hospital	International	Needs a lot of work, especially internationalising
Tank Banks	Britain	Needs developing
Siege of Kut	Iraq/ Turkey/ India	Needs better citations
Scorched earth policy	Russia	The section on WWI in this article needs expanding
Independent Labour Party	Britain	The impact of attention paid to independence by the Independent Labour Party during WWI could be greatly developed. (See the section "The ILP and the Great War")
Lest We Forget Project	Canada	Orphan article
Women in the First World War	International	This and the following two articles need consolidating/ sorting out/ developing
Women in the military	International	Citations need improving
Women in warfare and the military (1900–1939)	International	Existing article needs internationalising
African farmers in WWI	Africa	Africans were porters in WWI. New article needed on this?

Pictures

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We are organizing the events together with Europeana and we hope that as many of you will help out with writing about the history behind these specially chosen and uploaded pictures! When the edit-a-thons take place, be sure to add the uploaded pictures in as many language versions as possible!

You can find the uploaded pictures on Wikimedia Commons here. Please add them to the gallery and connect them to suitable articles that we should work on. Every national organiser should localize the gallery before the contest on their event page.

We will also ask Europeana's GLAM partners to pick their favourite pictures in their collection, connect them to suitable articles and (if they are not already there) add them to Europeana's portal Then we will help to upload them to Wikimedia Commons and add them here.