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UCNISS/Sport Wiki Academy/Wikipedians in residence

< UCNISS | Sport Wiki Academy

Getting Wikipedians to help

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For most sport organizations, there would be little need for a Wikipedian in residence because the potential content related to their organization would be rather limited. If you are an athlete or a rural sport team, you may be lucky to be mentioned in Wikipedia, even luckier if there is an article about you. If you are a larger sport organization such as Australian Rugby Union or the Australian Football League, there may be several hundred articles that relate to your organization on some level. These include season summaries, team and athlete related articles, articles about the league or federation, an article about the sport your organization is involved with. If that is the case, you may want help improving the content related to your organization and Wikimedia Australia may be able to help by you get a Wikipedian in residence.

Things to remember about Wikipedia before seriously considering this:

  • Wikipedians work for free and most support the ethos of free culture;
  • Paying for work to be done on Wikipedia is generally frowned upon by Wikipedian culture;
  • As many sport organizations are not non-profits, Wikipedians will respond differently to you than they would to a non-profit organization; and
  • You ultimately cannot control the content on Wikipedia as it belongs to the community.

If your organization understands those issues and can live with those issues, if there is enough content related to your organization to justify getting involved, Wikimedia Australia can help set you up with a Wikipedian in residence for a weekend, a week or even a month. When Wikimedia Foundation in the USA did this with the British Museum in London, Wikipedia:GLAM/BM the Wikipedian in residence helped the organization use Wikipedia in several ways:

  • Set up a workshop where Wikipedians could see behind the scenes of the organization and let the Wikipedians see some of the unique artifacts they have that might be worthy of articles and the work that the organization did. This was coupled with another workshop where local Wikipedians showed people inside the organization how to edit Wikipedia in a way that did not conflict Wikipedia's rules. Wikipedia:GLAM/BM
  • Found volunteers who would help translate content about materials relevant to the organization into content other language Wikipedias. Often this involved school groups. Wikipedia:GLAM/BM
  • Created a contest offering gift vouchers if content in a category about artifacts related to that organization appeared on the main page of any language Wikipedia. Wikipedia:GLAM/BM
  • Created a photos wanted listing, for people who wanted images to help enhance articles related to the organization. Wikipedia:GLAM/BM

Wikimedia Australia can try to assist sports organizations in accomplishing this by using their contact network to see if any editors would be interested in helping your sport organization accomplish similar goals.

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