Submissions:2018/Wiki Loves Your Community


 * Title: Wiki Loves Your Community


 * Theme (optional): Relationship Building & Support, Editor Recruitment & Retention


 * Academic Peer Review option:  No


 * Type of submission: Presentation


 * Author: Jackie Koerner and Steven Pruitt


 * E-mail address: @


 * Wikimedia username: Jackiekoerner, Ser Amantio di Nicolao


 * Affiliation(s) (optional):

“Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge Wikipedia collects and disseminates.” -Wiki Loves Monuments
 * Abstract:

When participating in the OCLC Wikipedia+Libraries training, one librarian told a story. A patron came to her to find information about a small town on the Texas-Mexico boarder. She had a choice: create a list of resources and educate one patron, or create a Wikipedia page and educate uncounted others. She chose the latter and reached over 400 people in the first few weeks.

Large swaths of North America are without Wikipedia coverage. This is cultural heritage that is undocumented and unknown to much of the world. As time continues, the risk of losing this precious content increases. These risks range from new developments destroying physical cultural heritage to generations taking their accumulated knowledge with them as they age and pass on from this world.

Wiki Loves Your Community proposes combining several valuable initiatives in the Wiki-community. First, we will model after the very successful Wiki Loves Monuments initiative. Second, we will encourage authorship of content by local historical societies and GLAM institutions, which already possess a wealth of knowledge and people invested in the preservation of information. Third, we will encourage the local communities to get involved in content curation. They know the importance of notable features of their local communities. Finally, this project hopes to utilize every community’s under-appreciated population: retired people! They have the maturity to know about certain historically critical aspects of communities and tell the stories that connect us all.

Eventually as the project scales, additional aspects will be included from other successful projects. This includes, for example, utilizing a grid illustrating the geography covered and not yet covered by content. This would be similar to the coverage illustration of Geograph Britain and Ireland. The hope is this project would start in North America and be a template project, structured yet flexible encough, that other communities around the world could copy and adjust as needed.

Come learn about how you can help make this project a success.


 * Length of presentation: 30 or 45 min, as time allows in the schedule.


 * Special requests: Projector, computer and sound not required.


 * Preferred room size: 25


 * Have you presented on this topic previously? If yes, where/when?: No.


 * If you will be incorporating a slidedeck during your presentation, do you agree to upload it to Commons before your session, with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, including suitable attribution in the slidedeck for any images used?: Yes.


 * Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?: Yes.

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