Using Wikipedia will benefit your local community by:
- Providing locals with the skills they can use, wherever and whenever they are online, to create, edit and link articles in Wikipedia about local landmarks, locations, historical and contemporary events and notable people from your area, accessible on a global basis.
- Allowing your community to access a platform where your digital collections and expert knowledge can be uploaded and made available to all Wikipedia authors who then use them in new articles and add value to the images through their own knowledge and research.
- Enhancing the local profile and attractions of your area on Wikipedia through the development and expansion of the Wikipedia articles that have already been written regarding your community.
- Providing an opportunity to network with likeminded local knowledge specialists and library services within the region as well as a professional development opportunity for all library staff.
- Placing the library in the centre of this initiative, as host, content provider and facilitator
3–The world of Wiki
What is a Wiki?–A Wiki is a website whose users can add, modify or delete its contents via a web browser using simplified markup language or rich text editor. These websites are developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to edit and add content.
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Wikimedia Australia (http://wikimedia.org.au/)–is the Australian branch of the international Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Australia is an independent, not-for-profit organisation which hosts and supports a range of projects that contain information about Australia and Australians. These projects use the Wiki software.
Below are some of the Wikimedia projects that would be of interest:
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Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia)–is a free collaborative, multilingual internet encyclopedia supported by the non profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of February 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 283 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet, ranking as the 6th most popular website on internet and having an estimated 365 million. It’s estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly page views from the US alone.
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Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org)–Often shortened to just “Commons”, this website is an online repository of free-use images, sounds, videos and other files. The scope of the material uploaded to the site is limited to educational material that is available under a free license. Photographs of your family BBQ are not in the scope! Wikimedia Commons however does have a good collection of historical public domain photos, wildlife and nature photography and images of buildings and architectural features.
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Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org)–similar to Wikipedia, Wiktionary is a free multilingual internet dictionary with meanings that can be created by anyone. Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. The site aims to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are included.
